


Newton in the Sky with Diamonds

by IssyLily



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Choking, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Jewish Character, Kaiju Newton Geiszler, M/M, Newton Geiszler Recovery Arc, POV Hermann Gottlieb, Post-Drift (Pacific Rim), Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Top Hermann Gottlieb, but only the bits that I like, partially canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:20:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28196079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IssyLily/pseuds/IssyLily
Summary: Hermann’s given up on there being any chance of separating Newton from the Kaiju that has... infected him. And even if he hadn’t, the decision's been made for him. It's out of his hands, and there’s nothing left that he - one man, laid low by the most indescribable heartache - can do to save him. The PPDC are turning off the lights.The one thing Hermann will not do is let him go into the darkness alone.But then, hope was always a funny thing.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 18
Kudos: 48





	1. The Awakening

The first few weeks break him more than any statistical modelling or logarithmic equation could have predicted.

It hurts to see once wild eyes so vacant; for a face that has been in his dreams every night for nearly twenty years be so foreign. He observes the being through wired glass, and every movement is wrong – every breath screams that something is different. He wonders how he could have missed it, before. The cadence of the voice is different – the creature speaks with a lackadaisical intonation, humming along to questions during its daily interrogations, as if this were a mere inconvenience akin to a queue at the Post Office. In fairness, an inconvenience is all it probably is at this stage. It knows they cannot- _will not_ harm it.

It knows this because of Hermann. Because – after four weeks of being spat at, jeered at and ridiculed over and over and over by the parasite inside of the body formerly recognised as Doctor Newton Geiszler PhD (or Doctor Newton Geiszler PhD PhD PhD PhD PhD PhD, as he had once insisted on being called during what had turned into the longest week of Hermann’s life) – what remained of the PPDC had dared to mention the words “pressure tactics” in his presence.

The monster had laughed itself hoarse inside its cell as it listened to the deafening bellows of Doctor Hermann Gottlieb, the furious and desperate onslaught of a man laid so low by loss that he promised to eviscerate an entire department if they dared lay a finger on it.

 _How dare you even suggest such a thing? How_ dare _you-_

_Doctor Gottlieb, it’s time. It’s given us nothing. This is a tried and tested method of retrieving information from a subject-_

_We can’t even be sure that it can feel pain! The hold it has is psychic, not physical. You could sit there and rip out his fingernails one by one and all it would do is mock you further. Which at this stage, is all that you deserve._

_Sir, I think-_

_I don’t care what you think! If any of you go near him – if you even_ touch _him – I’ll pull this building down brick by brick with you all still inside of it._

It shouldn’t have worked as a deterrent. He didn’t look much, with his long, delicate fingers, ashen skin, and slender form wrapped in clothing more suited to an Oxbridge don than to a man promising Hell’s wrath upon a secret quasi-military unit in the heart of the Japanese countryside. And yet that was the last mention of it. Oh, the creature had kept on chuckling for the rest of the afternoon, and Hermann watched it through the plexiglass and _despised_ it, but he would not allow them to hurt Newton. Or whatever was left of him.

After his outburst, and the subsequent retraction in strategy, one of the psychologists had made a brief comment to him about how “close” they must have been. Hermann remembered giving her a terse nod – a confirmation of her suspicions, and a dismissal of further questions. Yet in his head, he thought scathingly _close? It wasn’t a case of being close. He was mine. I was his._

He refused to leave the facility, taking up a residence in one of the abandoned cleaning rooms. There were no windows, and a lingering scent of chlorine and bleach, but he had gotten used to a life without luxury after all his years in the Hong Kong Shatterdome. He had found a futon and pressed it up against the wall, and kept his electronics in a small knapsack in the corner. The rest of his possessions were still in his apartment in Massachusetts, but it had been an age since he had been there, and very probably an age before he would return. He didn’t miss the place – full of IKEA furniture, and pointless trinkets, and empty rooms. It had never felt like home. Not like Hong Kong. Not like with Newt.

He barely slept. When he did, he dreamed of the man he loved, and that hurt almost as much as watching the creature parade around in his skin. It was a violation of nature – no it was a violation against Elohim – for a monster to inhabit the skin of someone so holy. It was a perversity, the slow and casual rape of his best friend, the erasure of a man so _good_. The rest of the world had lost its leading Kaiju Biologist, but Hermann had lost the other half of himself.

They had tried initialising a Drift, with proper materials this time instead of the junk that Newt had managed to patch together all those years ago in the back alleys of Hong Kong. Hermann, not yet disabused of the notion that he could be the one to bring Newton back, had gone in fearless and full of hope – only for his mind to rebound immediately, like a bouncy ball propelled against a wall. The Drift would not take. His connection with Newt was a black hole, a void, a vacuum. Instead he heard laughter – the echoes of hundreds if not thousands of voices, all _laughing_ at him from across the Bridge, from deep within the Anteverse.

Before all of this, he had prided himself on never publicly losing his temper (in the laboratory with Newton did not count…). But this time, he had ripped the Pons machinery from his head and thrown it with as much force as he could manage across the floor. The sharp clang of metal on metal relieved the pain in his stomach for a second – and then it came back. He had rushed from the laboratory as fast as he could, sending sparks of pain up his leg, straight to his living quarters. He had wept silently into the mattress, and he did not stop shaking until he saw that he had bruised his arms from clutching them.

To lose Newt in the physical realm was a torture. To lose him from inside his own head was like dying. A grief so profound, and felt by so few. In those moments, Hermann finally understood why Raleigh Becket had run as far away from the programme as he could when his brother was killed. The cruelty of the empty space in his brain that Newton Geiszler had once occupied overwhelmed him.

He had returned to the laboratory the next day, but he no longer interacted with the creature face-to-face. Instead, he watched through the glass, and waited.

He waits every day until ten long weeks have passed, and their least favourite option becomes their only one.

“It might kill him,” Hermann says, rapping his cane against the floor in frustration.

The scientists no longer startle away from him when he raises his voice. He dislikes the way that they look at him at him now – not with respect, but with pity.

“It might not,” pipes up a voice from the side-lines, and Hermann is struck by the desire to shake them.

“He is not your _experiment_ ,” Hermann hisses, and the person attached to the voice at least has the decency to avert their eyes back to their computer.

He turns back to Doctor Juan Pablo Pedreira – one of the foremost clinical psychiatrists in the global South, and a former _Marechal_ to boot – who looms over him. The Doctor looks weary; he is tired of battling civilians who really should not be in his laboratory – especially when the only thing they can bring themselves to provide is heartsick commentaries, instead of any kind of viable plan. Their relationship has not been fruitful over the months; Hermann resents him for treating Newt like a piece of infected meat, and Pedreira has started referring to him as “the Widow” in his private case notes. 

“You cannot do this, not without knowing what the effect may be. The creature’s hold is so whole that doing this could erase Newton entirely,” Hermann says firmly, though his blood is boiling. Neither man misses the tightening of his fist on his cane; neither man comments on the whitening of his knuckles.

“With respect, Doctor Gottlieb, saving your friend is not, and never has been, the aim of this project. We are supposed to be gathering information. Given that we have been unable to extract the necessary data-” (the _because of your interruptions_ goes unsaid) “-our new aim is to eradicate the last remaining Kaiju presence from this world. I’m sure you can agree that it is a sensible aim, Doctor.”

He leans forwards slightly, his extra height pressing over Hermann like a shadow. Hermann tries to avoid scoffing at him – as if one brawny Brazilian man could intimidate him after everything that he has seen.

“Very sensible, Doctor,” Hermann says drily, “But not whilst Doctor Geiszler is still psychically connected to the piece of Kaiju that you intend to kill.”

_You can finally meet Alice!_

Hermann had physically balked at Newton when he had said that. The idea that he could be interested in meeting his… partner, lover, wife, for God’s sake, after the raw sandpaper-on-an-open-wound split they had had in the years before, was beyond incomprehensible to him.

He wishes now that he had put his pride and his broken heart to one side, and taken up Newt’s offer, instead of letting it become one of the many ways in which he would have been able to stop all of this (of which there truly are hundreds, the most significant of which he likes to count like sheep in bed at night).

“We kill the Kaiju brain that remains, and its link with Doctor Geiszler also dies. You’ll have your… friend back,” Dr Pedreira says reasonably, as if all the available evidence doesn’t point to the fact that there is now more Kaiju than Newton left, “Really you should be celebrating.”

“This isn’t like a Human-Jaeger Drift!” Hermann cries out, stepping out of Pedreira’s shadow and into the light, “This isn’t a machine detaching itself from a human psyche. This is a link between two organic components – one of which has suckered onto the other for dear life. It is highly likely that the presiding organism will simply take the other one with it upon its… moment of expiration.”

Pedreira, for a moment, looks as if he is going to shrug his shoulders, and Hermann has to sternly restrain himself from launching into an attack.

“We lost many good men during the Human-Kaiju War. But we sacrificed them so that humanity could be safe. We allowed that balance to slip by letting the brain live so that we could study it, but our investigations have yielded little of use. Now we must rectify it. And if it means we lose one more good man, then that is the price.”

“That is not a price worth paying!” Hermann shouts, alight with anger, but before he can carry on, he is cut off.

“Doctor Gottlieb, do not make the mistake of thinking you are the only person who has lost someone to these creatures. The entire world is still in mourning. At least you will be here to grieve, and not dead alongside him,” Pedreira snaps, exasperated, and Hermann sees red.

“So this will kill him, then.” His jaw sets, his leg locks. “After all of your patronising platitudes, you capitulate that killing the Kaiju brain will kill Newton too?”

“It is the most likely outcome. I am truly sorry. But you spent a decade trying to stop a war, so I hope one day that you can appreciate that I am preventing one,” the doctor replies straightforwardly, and Hermann feels as though he has been punched in the stomach. All the air rushes out of him immediately, and as he stares at the Pedreira’s retreating figure, he is suddenly grateful for his cane, grateful to have something to steady himself upon.

Everyone in the laboratory is very pointedly _not_ looking at him. Unable to stand in the presence of the people who have made this decision, he storms from the room and paces down the hallway to the cell where the monster is kept.

The glass is one-way, and yet it always seems to know when Hermann is watching, as if he can smell him on the air. It smiles using a mouth that Hermann used to know so well, and he takes a step back from the glass.

“I want to be with him. When it happens,” he says breathlessly to the first person who comes across him in the hallway.

The uniformed guard stares at him, perplexed by the request from the man who has steadfastly refused to go anywhere near the cell for the last two months, but carries his request to Rikushō Matsuo – the man in charge of the base. Hermann gets along with the man about as well as he does Pedreira, but at the very least Matsuo seems to appreciate that Newton has a worth beyond being used as a test subject. Matsuo was in Hong Kong when Leatherback had finally fallen, when the Breach had closed. He knew how crucial the two of them had been to the end of a decade-long war.

“We will allow you to be in the room,” Matsuo says gently as he approaches Hermann in the corridor a quarter of an hour later, sympathy etched into every line on his face, “But it might hurt.” He claps Hermann on the shoulder and squeezes, and Hermann does not shake him off.

“I just need-” Hermann begins, but his throat closes up before he can continue. Inside the cell, the creature is swinging its feet lazily, eyes closed as if in rapturous dream, unaware of its impending death.

“It is okay, Doctor Gottlieb,” Matsuo reassures him, “We understand.”

 _If only you could_ , Hermann thinks, but manages the pretence of a smile. Social niceties, here at the end of all things. Newton would be proud of him.

“Do you know… when?” he asks quietly, steeling himself, a vision of the Hong Kong War Clock appearing in his mind, preparing to set itself for the first time since 2025.

Matsuo’s mouth tightens into a frown.

“Tomorrow. 09:00 before noon.”

Fifteen hours. Hermann inclines his head, and Rikushō Matsuo takes his leave. His footsteps echo down the metallic corridor, and Hermann finds his eyes drawn back to the creature.

It looks him directly in the eye and grins.

That night, he does not sleep at all. Instead, he stares into the darkness of his cleaning cupboard-cum-bedroom and allows the hours to rush past. Fifteen hours or fifteen minutes, what does it matter now? Newton is on Death Row and there is nothing he can do to stop it. There is little reason to do anything but, once again, count all the things he could have done to prevent all of this from happening. 

  1. _Put his blasted feelings aside and “met” Alice_
  2. _Incapacitated Newton during the drone activation_
  3. _Hacked into Newton’s programme and deactivated the drones (he has a spare degree in computer engineering, he could outsmart a_ biologist _)_



Before the alarm on his watch buzzes, he thinks of the most important one of all: _he could have stayed with him. He could have not left._ And as he rises, splashes water onto his face, and avoids the mirror, Hermann lets himself peek at a memory he sealed many years ago. A shouting match without the usual underlying light-heartedness; accusations of neglect, carelessness, loneliness ( _and oh, he should have seen that the monster was already eating away at Newt’s insides_ ); his hands, angrily zipping up his luggage and dragging them behind him towards the front door; Newt dragging him backwards and pressing their mouths together in an act of both violence and total adoration; him slamming the door behind him, and refusing to let himself look back.

_Idiot. Fool. He should’ve just said “I forgive you”._

One of the laboratory assistants – aware of his own Drift with the Kaiju – had once asked him why he thought the Precursors had chosen to target Newt, instead of him. He had rambled an answer about his old friend the ‘Kaiju-groupie’ but hadn’t let them know his real theory: that Newt felt solitude more keenly and more deeply than anyone he had ever met. And that when Hermann had left him, they had been able to prey on that feeling without anyone there to stop them. Hermann had no proof for this, no tangible evidence, no mathematics. But he knew it to the be the truth.

He had felt it through the Drift.

He spends his walk to the cell wishing it had been him. If anyone deserved all of this, it was him, not Newton.

The creature, for all of its millennia-old wisdom and other-worldly sentience, doesn’t seem to realise that anything is amiss until Hermann enters the cell, and takes a seat across from it.

“Well, well, Doctor Gottlieb, what a _lovely_ surprise,” the monster calls, rolling the vowels like a yawn, “And here I was thinking that you didn’t want to see me anymore. I’ve missed you.”

Hermann shifts awkwardly in his seat, the metal chair refusing to let his leg rest in a comfortable position. He keeps his gaze trained upon the ground and his mouth firmly shut. He is not here to listen to this creature taunt him – he is here to witness the passing of his best friend. He tries to picture it differently; he sees a hospital, bright white lights gleaming overheard, the steady rustle of lab coats passing by the bed. They’re turning off Newton’s life support, that’s all it is. He’s been gone for so long already. They’re just letting him rest now. And he’s here to hold his hand, and whisper goodbye in his ear.

He’s just here to say goodbye.

“My, my Herm you look sad as shit!” the monster cackles, laughing at the pained expression that he cannot keep from his face.

“Do not-” Hermann huffs, forgetting himself for the briefest moment, “Do not call me that.”

“But he used to call you that alllllll the time,” the creature pouts, contorting a sad face out of what remains of Newton Geiszler, “Herm, baby, hot-stuff. And what did you used to call him?”

“Stop it!” Hermann snaps, but the creature clicks its neck and waggles its fingers, still encased in handcuffs.

“Oh, there it is. _Darling._ You guys are seriously cute. You know you absolutely broke his heart when you left, right?” the monster taunts, and Hermann looks up from the floor in righteous anger.

The feeling evaporates immediately.

He hasn’t been this close in months, and Newt – the body is still his, if only for a few minutes longer – looks as though he is barely clinging to life. The creature has refused food most days, to the point where they have been feeding him intravenously, and it shows in the new slenderness of his wrists, and the looseness of his shirt. His skin is pallid, dark freckles standing out like stars in the night sky. His tattoos stand out too, a livid mockery.

For a second, he bitterly hopes that this is going to hurt.

“I know I did,” Hermann replies, choking back grief, “But I’m here now, Newton. I’m not leaving this time.”

“He can’t hear you,” the creature calls musically, singing the words to a tune that Hermann does not remember the words to.

“You can shut up,” Hermann says with a snarl vicious enough that the creature recoils, “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to him. If you would be so kind as to not eavesdrop.”

The creature scoffs, and pulls an imaginary zip over its mouth. Hermann hopes that the entire regiment of people watching from outside the cell take heed too.

“I’m not leaving,” Hermann says again, slowly, softly, savouring every word, every last second of his goodbye, “I’m here until the very end. I’m here. I’m sorry I was ever gone.”

He smiles, small and exhausted, at what Newt would say if he could actually hear Hermann admit that one out loud. He searches for a glimmer of a reaction, but there is none.

“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere… I’ve- I’ve got you.”

“What exactly is going on?” the monster interrupts, pushing forward as far it can against its restraints and tilting its head to stare over Hermann’s shoulder and through the glass. “What are you doing? What are you planning?”

Hermann smiles. And suddenly it knows.

The creature starts yelling and shouting and screaming vicious threats like a rabid dog, so loud and so enraged that it starts to literally foam at the mouth. Newt’s face contorts into a frenzied vessel for the creature, so apoplectic with fury that its bonds shake and the metal begins to keen and pull apart. It bellows and roars – alien and ravenous and _terrified_ – and tries to rip itself free as its restraints begin to come apart.

Hermann can hear them banging on the door for him to get out, but he intends to keep his promise. He isn’t leaving.

He looks down at his watch, and breaths steadily in and out. The minute hand hits, and 9AM falls like the eve of war.

He looks at the last remaining vestige of Doctor Newton Geiszler, and whispers, “You were worth every minute of it.”

The creature bursts free of its restraints, but before it can take a step towards Hermann, it falls to the ground and starts seizing uncontrollably. Its head knocks against the ground repeatedly as the Kaiju brain dies over a mile away across the base, and it reaches out its hands to claw uselessly against the concrete flaw, digging its fingers in, trying to grip onto life.

It tries to shout; Hermann thinks he can hear it trying to utter “I’m not leaving”, but its voice is lost to the immense vibrations shocking its body. It rolls onto its back and the sheer force of its shaking forces Newton’s spine off of the ground like something out of a horror film. Blood starts to stream from Newton’s nose and ears, the shock of scarlet against his white face a work of abstract art.

Hermann could watch it happen to somebody else. But not to him.

He clambers out of his chair, just as Rikushō Matsuo bursts through the door to warn him not to touch him, and gathers Newton up into his arms. He holds his head in his lap to stop it from colliding against the floor, and strokes his cheek, horrified by the cold, clammy skin that he finds there. Newton always used to burn hot when he touched him like this; he used to blush, like no one had ever cradled him before. Like no one had ever loved him.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” he murmurs whilst the creature desperately tries to burst forth out of Newton’s body, trying to cling to a life that it knows it is losing. Blood is spattering just about everywhere. His shirt sleeves are wet with it. The shaking is so violent and so intense that Hermann barely manages to hold on. But he doesn’t let go. He can’t. He holds on as tight as he can, and carries on whispering, “I’ve got you.”

It feels like it goes on for hours, but the reality is that it takes just over forty seconds for the creature to die. The shaking subsides slowly, and Newton’s body goes limp in Hermann’s lap, heavy and breathless.

A long time ago, before loud arguments and slammed doors, he thought he had held him for the last time. If only that had been it. He would give anything… anything for that to have been it.

Matsuo stands guard in the doorway, curious scientists hovering behind him to catch a glimpse of the result of their test, but Hermann shrouds Newton the best that he can. _Give him a little dignity,_ he wants to shout, _he has been denied so much of it_.

He slumps further onto the ground, and gently brushes his fingers through Newton’s hair. It’s filthy really – greasy and unkempt and far too long – but his hands remember the movements as if they were a piano concerto, and he finds an odd sense of comfort in the movement. If he closes his eyes, maybe he can pretend…

“Doctor Gottlieb, I must ask you to leave the area now,” Matsuo said gently, talking as if he were a hunter trying to calm a trapped beast, “We need to run further tests, and decontaminate the area.”

The room is silent, save for Hermann’s heavy breaths. Despite their barely-there tolerance for him during his three-month stay, none of the lab technicians nor the soldiers nor the psychiatrists seem wont to disrupt him. They may have condoned this, but that does not mean that they will celebrate it. In fact, their silence seems to reveal the flaw in their plan – they had vastly underestimated the cost of taking a life.

Hermann ignores Matsuo. The Rikushō has no direct authority over him. Nor does he have the right to drag him away from a man that he has been inexplicably entwined with for nearly half of his life. Investigations, experiments, hypotheses be damned. The science, the numbers, the discoveries… they can all _piss off_.

He holds Newton closer, clutching at his side, unable to take his hands off of him. He follows the trails of blood that are beginning to dry on his cheeks and his neck, brushing over them with his fingertips, wishing he had a cloth to wipe it all off with. He will make sure they do, before they bury him.

He won’t cry in front of them, but he won’t let go either.

“Doctor Gottlieb, we need to move the body-”

“You’re not ‘moving the body’, Rikushō Matsuo,” Hermann says harshly, “You’re laying Newton Geiszler to rest.”

The Rikushō nods slowly in apology. Hermann takes a deep breath in and moves Newt’s body as gently as he can from out of his embrace. He wobbles getting to his feet, reaching for his cane, and the moment that he is totally extricated from his touch, he feels numb from head to toe.

The chatter begins outside, the time for mourning over. Hermann can already hear mentions of _adrenaline spikes_ and _immense psychic activity,_ but he can’t bring himself to care. He knew before he came here that this would be the end of the road for him, insofar as the Kaiju were involved. It wasn’t work worth doing without his lab partner.

He steps cautiously towards the cell door as the medical personnel began to file into the room, ignoring Matsuo’s kind expression, but all of a sudden, a chill begins to climb up the rungs of his spine, and he feels all the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, one by one. His heart doesn’t just skip a beat – it stops.

“Dude, seriously, what is it going to take for you to call me Newt?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not really a Beatles fan, but this title popped into my head and it just seemed to work.
> 
> And if you're thinking that sleeping in a former cleaning storage cupboard for 10 weeks is bad... I once slept in a corridor for 3 weeks to protest corruption at my university... It can be done ;)


	2. The Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt is alive. Hermann tries to cope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The playlist for this chapter is available here on Spotify - "Newton Geiszler's Post-Awakening Recovery Playlist Vol i."  
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7mcXG1NXueaaPBIrKuEyZc?si=yv6u3IkGTQ2GodW0wYBy3g

Ever since the very first Drift, Hermann has had vivid dreams.

Not to say that he hadn’t experienced them before. Now and then, after long laboratory days and various shouting matches, he would end up rutting into his sheets at 4AM with the image of Newton’s hands pulling at his belt buckle flooding through his brain, but it was occasional, and he dreamt in sepia, in black and white.

Now every night he bathes in ultraviolet, magenta, neon yellows and oranges and blues. Newt is there – always, immoveable – and his psyche crashes and dances and spins out of control. It makes him feel nauseated upon awakening. Most unsettlingly, when he looks down in the dreamscape, his legs seem to belong to something else – they are reptilian, almost, scaly and alien, and he runs without impediment along the synapses that pass through his mind. And although it cannot possibly be real life, when he wakes to a dull ache in his thigh, he has to press his fingernails into his palms to stop himself from crying out in jealousy.

He knows he is awake now though. The pain in his chest – spreading like weeds and knotting themselves through his ribs and his sternum – is too rich and too deep to be imagined.

He doesn’t turn around.

He knocks past Rikushō Matsuo, past all of the people packed into the rooms and corridors surrounding the cell, and paces back to his room. He can hear people shouting his name, incessantly calling for him, and as an answer, he slams the door with as much vitriol as he can manage. He is suddenly aware of how heavily he is breathing, how he gasps for breath like it is just out of reach.

Hermann sinks to his knees, and if he was a religious man, it would be in prayer. The echoes of the words his father had taught him reverberate around his skull – _she-ma yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad_ – but the collision of cartilage on concrete causes a crest of pain to shoot through his leg that cuts off the recital.

“It can’t be,” he whispers to the empty room, because if he doesn’t say it aloud, the hope slowly rising inside of him might let itself loose and wreak havoc.

He crawls onto his futon, letting his cane drop limply by his side, and spends the next forty-eight hours caught in the realm between sleeping and waking. When he finally arises, he finds himself parched beyond reason and drains his water bottle in three large gulps. He stares at his reflection in the small mirror atop the basin, and he looks _old_. The last ten years – and the ten before it – have passed so rapidly that he sometimes forgets he is approaching fifty.

He is too old for people to start coming back from the dead. He has experienced enough technological advancement through his life. Resurrection is a discovery for the next generation.

He changes into an identical outfit, slightly embarrassed at having fallen asleep fully dressed, and heaves himself out of his room. He slips an old trinket into his pocket before he leaves, just in case, and they burn against his thigh. The opaque lights lining the hallway sear his eyes for a moment, but he could walk the route blind.

 _Once more unto the breach_.

He finds the cell empty.

“Doctor Gottlieb, with me,” comes a familiar Brazilian accent, and Hermann follows the white lab coat without so much as looking its owner in the face. They traverse several corridors of the facility, through laboratories that Hermann had not realised existed, until they reach a large room right at the edge of the campus. Unlike his own acquisitioned quarters (though he admits that he is technically a squatter), this room has immensely high ceilings and is painted a pale cream that neutralises the environment. It is a total contrast to the metallic lethargy and rusted decay that Hermann has become accustomed to in his life; where the exterior wall should be is just glass, looking out onto the lush, forested Japanese countryside.

It is the first time he has seen the outside since Newton’s internment.

“He’s been asking for you,” Pereira says, pushing the door open with a large hand, and holding it open for Hermann to walk through. He allows him just enough time to put his cane over the threshold before letting the door shut on him.

Clearly someone isn’t happy about being proved wrong.

His eyes automatically begin to scan the room for signs of life, but even he isn’t fast enough to register the blur that is Newton Geiszler before the man crashes into him and nearly topples him to the floor.

“Goodness… gracious me, Doctor Geiszler,” Hermann stammers, but the protest dies in his mouth as he feels Newton’s arms crawl across his shirt and cling to his middle. His cane falls from his hand as he returns the embrace, gripping onto Newton with so much force that he briefly fears that he might burst like a balloon.

“Herm, you’re squashing me,” Newton chokes out into his chest, his head nestled into the crook of his neck, his breath warm and slightly damp and _alive, alive, alive!_

Hermann doesn’t relinquish an ounce of his grip, one arm clutching at his back, and the other sliding up his neck towards his head. The last time he wound his fingers through his hair, Newton had been dead. And now Hermann could feel his heartbeat, could feel his breath on his throat, the slight shake of his hands on Hermann’s waist.

“Forgive me Newton, I am- I am exceedingly happy to see you,” Hermann murmurs, his voice cracking midway through the sentence. He tilts his head backwards, trying to stop tears from rolling down his cheeks, but he fails miserably.

He finds that he doesn’t really care at all.

“It’s good to see you too man,” Newt echoes, “Took you long enough”. His voice is a little ragged, a little hoarse, and Hermann tightens his grip a little more when he remembers how the creature had screamed upon its death.

Hermann is too tall to be able to rest his forehead against Newton’s, so he kisses him lightly there instead. It feels like a blessing.

It takes a few minutes before the hug becomes uncomfortable, before they allow a small gap to open up between them. Hermann takes the opportunity to look down at Newton’s face, and his own cracks open into the widest smile he can manage.

“It’s a- a nice space that you have here,” he says stupidly, all sense leaving him.

Newt’s expression falls into bemusement, but then relaxes into a familiar smile – _god, he has missed that smile_ – and he turns towards the panoramic view.

“Yeah, it would be nice if I could see it though. Damn aliens took over my brain – didn’t stop to think that I would need my glasses back when they finally pissed off back to where they came from,” Newt garbles.

Hermann would listen to him read the phonebook just to hear him speak.

He awkwardly pats the side pocket of his shabby blazer, and pulls out a spare set of frames. He hands them to Newton, who looks as if he has just been handed the moon.

“What the hell man, where did you get these?” He jams them onto his face eagerly, and then squints a little bit. “These are better than nothing, but they’re like two prescriptions ago. How long have you had these?”

Hermann clears his throat.

“About six years… give or take,” he replies, staring at the window and willing himself not to blush.

“Six years.” He looks _delighted_. “Dude you are beyond hung up on me.”

“That may be so,” Hermann breaths out, and Newt smiles at his feet.

“How are you feeling?” Hermann dares to ask, and Newt furrows his brow, mentally swatting off the memories of the invasion.

“Not so bad. I’ve definitely felt worse. You remember that time I flooded the lab in Hong Kong with Kaiju Blue and then accidentally set it alight and we inhaled all those fumes? I mean you passed out, but I was high as a kite man, and the come down from it was intense-”

“Newton,” Hermann says gently, cutting him off mid ramble. They have known each other long enough now for the disguises to be all but useless. “Are you okay?”

Newt crosses his arms – his tattoos hidden from view by long white sleeves – and refuses to look up from the ground.

“I’ve had a monster in my brain for half a decade. Would you be okay?” he asks primly, but Hermann knows the bite in his voice isn’t intended to wound. 

“No, I don’t suppose I would,” Hermann says softly, his heart aching at the crestfallen look on Newton’s face.

He clears his throat.

“What is the- the er- the official prognosis?” he manages to ask. He doesn’t want to push this conversation further – he doesn’t want to hurt Newt – but there is a fire simmering in his stomach that demands he find out.

“Basically, all up in here-” he knocks against the side of his head, as if performing a bad punchline, “-is a mess. Even more than it was before. Forget the mania and the ADHD, apparently this is going to be much worse.

“I can’t- I can’t remember most of the past three years. But they don’t think the memory loss is going to be permanent. It’s going to start coming back.” He looks Hermann in the face. “I’m not sure I want it to.”

Newton fiddles with the collar of his shirt, and continues.

“And beyond the massive, supernova size PTSD I’m going to have going on, there’s the emotional trauma, the split personality effect, the fact that they won’t let me look at any confidential documents anymore because I’ve lost my security clearance, even though I WROTE THE DAMN THINGS!” Newton shouts at the door to his room, even though there is nobody out there listening.

(Hermann has clocked the three security cameras _inside_ the room though, and has no doubts that the whole place has been thoroughly wire-tapped).

“My brain has basically been put through a blender, and the doctors have no idea what’s going to happen, and neither do I, and every time I close my eyes I can see… _their world_ , and I can’t sleep, and I think they’re going to try and keep me here and experiment on me-”

Hermann harrumphs at that. “I wouldn’t let them,” he says quietly, and he reaches down and entwines his fingers with Newton’s, “I won’t let anything hurt you again.”

He rubs his thumb in concentric circles against Newt’s hand, and wishes it were more. Whilst his body had been infected by that creature, Hermann had felt nothing looking at it – now that it is Newton, and just Newton, he feels that old familiar tug, the deep-set longing that he has come to define his life by. And even though it has been years, he wants to lay him down, divulge him of every fabric and just touch him, touch every inch of him, bury his mouth in his skin and never crawl out again.

Even though he had left, those feelings had never dissipated. He knows that now is not the time to push, but he doesn’t plan on making that mistake a second time.

“Do you wanna…” Newt starts, losing confidence halfway through, and running a hand through his hair.

“Out with it Geiszler,” Hermann says, putting on an air of familiar contriteness that settles both of their nerves.

“Do you wanna stay and watch a movie or something? Apparently they’ve set me up with all the channels. Got lots of catching up to do. Unless you… want to get back to your cleaning cupboard?”

Newt’s expression is full of mirth, and Hermann nods his head to stop himself from doing something stupid like kissing him.

“I’m in no rush.”

That turns out to be a blessing in disguise.

Newt’s recovery at the facility is slow. Despite the incredible restoration that Hermann had witnessed on their first (re)meeting, it becomes more and more apparent that Newton’s old penchant for blustering his way through has disappeared. He makes bad jokes and laughs loudly and mocks Hermann’s dress sense like always (“ _seriously man, are you wearing brogues on a military base?”)_ , but the actions feel shallow now, and his expression grows more haunted with every passing day.

Hermann is given permission to move out of the cleaning cupboard (a victory for science, he thinks to himself, rolling his eyes) and into the room adjoined to Newt’s, but even there the distance feels like too much. Newt doesn’t cry out in the night, but Hermann can hear him tossing and turning and grasping at the sheets and whining quietly as his mind and memories burn through him. Pedreira doesn’t want him going in there to comfort him – something about “fostering co-dependency” and “preventing an authentic recovery” – and it makes Hermann burn too.

The worst part of all is the mood swings. Newt had always been unpredictable to most before, but Hermann could always read him like a book. Now, there are days where he awakens with the same rage that once nearly toppled Tokyo – a temper so ferocious that not even Hermann can quell it, and he is reduced to sitting in his room and listening to Newt shouting until he can no longer speak.

Other days, it is like talking to a stranger. Days where Newt forgets where exactly he is and why he is there, days where he looks at Hermann like he is a photograph in an old family album – a relative that he can’t quite remember the name of. There are days where he sits in front of the vast window and scratches at his tattoos – not enough to break the skin, but like he is trying to dig them out.

The musical therapy is Hermann’s idea. Pedreira had, surprisingly, not vetoed it straight away, and had even managed to track down an old CD player from somewhere in the capital. As Hermann walks into Newt’s room – not quite sure what to expect – he marvels at the machine, the likes of which he has not seen since he was a child. The book of CDs – generously donated by some of the older lab technicians – is even more incredible, a true relic of the late 20th century. It felt like eons have passed since then. Like the whole world has turned itself inside out.

They sit together – Newt sprawled across the cream shag-pile rug in the centre of the room, and Hermann on an adjacent chair – and start at the beginning.

His eyes closed, Hermann pulls his hands up to his chest, and begins to pluck at imaginary guitar strings, playing along to _Crosstown Traffic_ like he had written the chords himself, even though he knows he has never heard the song before.

_C7, F7, C7, F7, C7, F7-_

-his fingers rise and fall across empty space-

_C7, F7, Bb7, Eb, Ab7, C7-_

“Herm, it’s G7 not C7,” comes an amused voice, and Hermann grumpily opens his eyes. Newt scoffs at him playfully, “C’mon man, it’s Hendrix, you can’t go messing up the chords.”

“May I remind you Newton that I learnt how to play this song from _you_ ,” Hermann replies sternly, his foot tapping out the beat of the song against all of his instincts, “So if there are any mistakes, they’re because _you_ don’t know Hendrix.”

Newt makes a loud noise of protest, and Hermann feels a tight grin pulling at his cheeks. He closes his eyes again, loses himself in the psychedelic chaos of _Electric Ladyland_ , an album he is hearing for the first and the thousandth time. He had never resented the Drift for the way it had transposed some of Newton’s quirks and tics over to him – in fact, this one was rather enjoyable. He never had the patience for musical instruments in the past, and had never took the time to broaden his horizons beyond Bach (and, if he is honest with himself, a little bit of Queen too). Now the knowledge of a million songs lays at his fingertips.

He is grateful for this, if little else.

Iggy Pop follows Hendrix, and is then replaced with David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin, even Siouxsie and the Banshees. All of Newton’s heroes. They race through album after album, devouring every song until they feel drunk.

“Newton, do you not have anything a little quieter?” Hermann hears himself ask after the particularly rambunctious end of The Prodigy’s _Firestarter_.

“Holy shit, they’ve found us a Village People CD, what a throwback,” Newt says, almost in awe. He turns to Hermann with a shit-eating grin on his face and innocently asks, “New Year’s Eve, 2022? 2023? That one where you drank that entire bottle of Malib-”

_Of all things, of course he remembers that as plain as day._

“Don’t you dare,” Hermann warns, his cheeks reddening, and he wags a finger in warning and hopes that it is sufficiently intimidating.

It isn’t.

“Oh, I do dare,” Newt claps back, getting to his feet to replace the CD, and before Hermann can reach him, it begins.

“This is worse than K-Day,” Hermann whines, sinking back into his chair as the opening beat of the _YMCA_ permeates the air, his petulance another inherited feature from his esteemed former lover, “After all that I have done for you…”

The days go past like hours, and they slip into a routine easily enough. From the moment they are conscious – which, both weirdly and unsurprisingly, is usually within a single minute of one another – they proceed with the day attached at the metaphorical hip. Newt’s access to the rest of the facility begins to broaden – first to the lab techs’ canteen, where Newt slowly relearns the subtle art of eating (coffee is still on the prohibited list, though circumstances hardly deem it necessary anymore), and then further out to the courtyard and botanical gardens.

Because, Hermann thinks, why shouldn’t a private quasi-military base have a botanical garden? He rubs his temples at that one.

Newt loves it though, and because Newt loves it, they spend most of their time there. He roams the space whilst Hermann perches and reads and pretends to not watch his wonderment and awe as he discovers various species that he has _only ever seen in a freakin’ textbook man_. _No Hermann seriously, look at this quiver tree. This thing is native to South Africa, there are only like two hundred left in the world and they have one here! Look at it! Gorgeous piece of natural biological engineering right there – you couldn’t make that in a lab._

One of Newt’s various PhD’s is in phytochemistry and plant genomics, and though he feigns exasperation for the man’s amusement, Hermann is incredibly grateful for the excited explanations ( _rants_ , if he were being unkind) and demonstration that his knowledge seems to have been uninterrupted by his… experience. Newt is tolerating the primarily emotional aftermath of it all, but if he had been left without his science, without his life’s work all packed inside his exquisite brain, Hermann dreads to think what state he would be in.

After a little bit of gentle persuasion, Newt is allowed to take various cuttings to have in his room. He favours the Venus Flytrap (although Hermann refuses to take him “digging for critters” to feed it – there are _limits_ ) and spends sometimes a little too long watching its elegant movements. Hermann normally ends up sat on the carpet next to him, though he is far more entranced with the plants’ owner than the thing itself.

They don’t talk about it.

Nearly two months after the Awakening (patent pending, Newton informs him with glee one evening over dinner), Pedreira and Matsuo give the pair of them permission to leave the base for day trips. The allowance is given upon a plethora of conditions – including an armed guard, whose rules Hermann promises to abide by on behalf of them both – and they reach the outskirts of the Sumida district before they have to turn back. The pale pink cherry blossoms are beautiful, and Newt cannot bear the sight of the city.

Hermann holds his hand the entire way back – a silent car journey that lasts nearly two hours – but Newt doesn’t join him for dinner, or invite him to his room after to watch the X Files (they’ve just reached _Gethsemane_ , and damn him if he doesn’t want to know how Mulder survived that one), and Hermann lays awake the entire night trying to pretend that he can’t hear him sobbing into his pillow next door.

They don’t leave the base for a few weeks after that, but they do finish the X Files. Hermann hates the ending.

The next time, they venture into Nikko, the closest town. The unfamiliarity of the territory seems to help; they drink hōjicha tea in a cosy tearoom and talk about a recent paper released by a North American scientist which, unfortunately for the writer, contradicts much of Hermann’s research on the Breach. The locals stare as they rave at each other, perhaps worried that they are going to end up in a fist fight, but their discussion is vibrant, passionate, hilarious and when Newt hooks his pinky finger around his across the coffee table, Hermann is so in love he feels like he might just die of it.

In fact, Hermann is just beginning to suspect that this might all be a little too easy, until they run into Jake Pentecost a week later at the facility.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I knew Newt had to be gay because he has the exact same taste in music as me.


	3. The Antidote

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt and Hermann finally have the conversation they have been avoiding for weeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been listening to a lot of Maroon 5 whilst editing this. Seems to fit quite nicely with these two. Also sorry for all the italics. 
> 
> Now officially rated E... ;)

The new cadets, pilots, and research and developmental candidates are all housed on the opposite side of campus; Newt doesn’t have access to the area yet, and Hermann has yet to feel the need to travel there. Where he had once been desperate to learn every detail of the PPDC’s operations, he now feels the opposite; the less he knows, the better. The less he knows, and the less he contributes, the easier it will be to leave one day. He and Newt have given twenty years of their lives – their youth, their love, their very minds and souls – to the programme; there had to be an end to it. And even if _he_ could, Newt couldn’t stay here. Not after everything that had happened.

Jake Pentecost resembles his father to such an extent that Hermann has to stop himself from saluting in the corridor. Instead, he gives him a curt nod, with every intention to keep on walking.

The difference between Jake Pentecost and his father is that the latter knew well enough when _not_ to pry at an open wound.

“I heard you finally woke up Doctor Geiszler,” he says, eyeing Newt up and down with a frown settling onto his face.

Newt looks bemused, and Hermann loses his breath for a minute when he realises that he has not yet remembered the Marshal’s son, nor why he might have cause to look at him with such disdain.

If their roles had been reversed, Hermann would have chosen to politely continue the conversation under the pretence that _of course_ he knew Jake, and _of course_ he knew why he was looking at him like that.

Unfortunately, tact was not one of the characteristics that Newt had picked up from him in the Drift.

“Thanks man,” Newt replied, immediately on the defence, “I assume we interacted whilst I had the great big Kaiju monster gnawing away at my brain?”

Hermann claps his hand across his eyes.

Jake smirks, but it is more spiteful than amused. “Yeah, you assume correctly. I take it Doctor Gottlieb hasn’t brought you up to speed?”

“Doctor Pedreira advised us that allowing Newton’s memory to return by itself would be the best remedy to his amnesia,” Hermann jumps in quickly, and he unconsciously takes a small step to angle his body in front of Newt. That protective instinct isn’t new – it’s been there for decades.

“Amnesia, right,” Jake echoes, unconvinced, “Lucky for you man, I’d love to have forgotten the last few years.”

Newt keens at the bait, but Hermann reaches out a hand and presses it against Newt’s wrist. _Don’t_.

“Did I take a swipe at you or something dude? You wanna hit me back and make it all even? Do your worst, I don’t care, but don’t stand there and say I’m lucky,” Newt snaps, although he stays behind Hermann all the same, “I wake up some days and have no idea what’s going on. I wake up thinking it’s 2030 and I live in Massachusetts and suddenly this guy’s telling me it’s actually 2036 and I’m in Tokyo?! I’d take a few years doing – what? Military recon? You’re a big guy, you interested in the _big guns_? Whatever, I’d take a year of that over having to glue my freaking brain back together.”

“Newton,” Hermann hisses, a reprimand inherent in his voice, “This is Jake Pentecost. The Marshal- Stacker’s son.”

“Mako’s brother,” Jake spits, taking a step towards the two of them, visibly angry now. Hermann sees his fist clench, and although his first thought is for Newt – always for Newt – he feels a pang of sorrow in the pit of his stomach for Jake. For a young man, he has lost so much; he can scarcely imagine how it must be to live in the shadows of the dead, in the kingdom that they created. And how it must feel to walk the same hallowed halls as the person “responsible” for so much of the chaos that consumed them.

Hermann would defend Newt if it came to it, but he really would prefer not to have to. 

“My apologies _Ranger_ , Doctor Geiszler has a… psychotherapy appointment that he is now running late for,” Hermann improvises, grabbing Newt’s elbow and hoisting him around to walk in the opposite direction. “Please do take care,” he adds on as an afterthought, “I hope you… you and the programme are progressing well.”

He wants to say more, but another time. 

The walk back to their quarters is unexpectedly silent. Hermann had expected a litany of questions, exclamations and expletives – somewhere in the range of _what an asshole, who the hell does that guy think he is_ – but Newt’s mouth remains firmly (and unnervingly) shut. He paces ahead, gaining ground on the stairs as he nearly runs up them, leaving Hermann stumbling behind him, cursing the growing discomfort in his leg. Eventually he catches up, slightly breathless from the pursuit, and follows Newt into his quarters.

Before he can open his mouth, Newt locks the door behind him and then strides to the window.

“I knew that Mako… I don’t remember it, but it was just in my head that she was gone… what did I do to her Hermann?”

Newt’s voice trembles and Hermann feels sick.

“Mako died in a crash, Newton, you didn’t do anything to her,” Hermann says quietly, placatingly, like a parent reading a fairy tale to their child.

“That’s bullshit and you know it!” Newt shouts back, his temper not just fraying at the edges but actively incinerating. His voice permeates the air, echoing around the room until it is reverberating in Hermann’s ears, “Don’t _lie_ to me Hermann.”

“I’m not lying,” Hermann replies, trying to tamper down Newt’s rapidly growing volatility, but he soon realises that that tactic isn’t going to work. The biologist looks about five seconds from crossing the room and beating the truth out of him, so Hermann backs off, dropping into one of the seats in the area that constitutes Newt’s living room.

He clasps his hands together and does his best.

“The Precursors were responsible for Mako’s death,” he says firmly, refusing to make eye contact, “The fact that you were their vessel in this world does not make you responsible for their actions. You are not – legally, morally, ethically, qualifiedly – culpable, or complicit, in any of their behaviours, or the… consequences of their behaviours.”

Newt’s hand trembles when he takes off his glasses and tucks them into his shirt pocket. He rests his forearm against the glass and closes his eyes.

“We used to babysit her when she was a kid,” he breathes out, so faint and so shaky that Hermann can barely make out the words, “I taught her about mitosis and cell speciation and… I taught her every German swear word in existence.”

Mako was a bright child, one of very few that Hermann had ever liked (including when he had been a child himself, and had found himself continually unimpressed by the quality of humans his own age). She had been thirteen, going on fourteen when he and Newt had joined the PPCD, and whenever Pentecost was in the War Room, trying to ensure the world didn’t fall into oblivion, she would join the pair of them in the lab.

She had naturally gravitated towards Newton – the fun one, the creative one, the one who let her put her hands in Kaiju Blue (with gloves, _of course_ ) to make “the world’s deadliest finger painting” (he remembers the precise wording of the absolute bollocking Newton received for that to this day, but the image remained on the wall of their lab until they had packed up and moved out). But she always had time for him too – if Newt’s activities were too dangerous for her to participate in, she and Hermann would sit quietly and do sudokus together. She was always faster than him too; initially to his chagrin, and later, to his amusement.

Mako Mori was a gift of a person, and he had not had the chance to grieve her loss yet. But that did not mean he would allow Newton to blame himself.

“I killed her?” Newt chokes out, but it is less of a question and more of an exclamation of painful disbelief, “Why- How could you not tell me?!”

He is shouting again, but this time not in anger but because his heart is breaking and he needs somewhere to put the pain. There are tears unrestrained in his eyes; his hands move towards his face not to wipe them away, but to knot themselves in his hair.

“You did not kill her,” Hermann says back, but it comes out more like a plea than a fact, “You were not responsible for her death, no matter what Jake Pentecost believes. He is grief-stricken and angry and does not understand the complexity of-”

“The complexity of the fact that I – or whatever, the thing in me, it doesn’t _matter_ – murdered his sister?!”

He punches the glass – uselessly and pathetically – and then slides down against it and tilts his head back to rest upon it. His eyes are puffy and red and Hermann does not know how he can fix this.

“I am so sick of this,” Newt says, his voice trembling with the weight of it all, “I am so sick of finding out things about myself from other people. I hate it so much.”

Hermann rises out of his chair, shuffles across the room, and sinks down onto the floor next to Newt. He does not reach out to touch him, and his voice ties itself in a knot in his throat. It hurts so much to see this pain; it damn near kills him that he can’t take it away.

“Newton, you’re in the very early stages of recovery from a severe psychological trauma that no one else on this planet has ever experienced, or ever will. You have to be patient with yourself. Not merely that, but you must forgive yourself too,” Hermann says gently, reaching across to rest his hand atop Newt’s knee.

“How am I supposed to forgive myself for things that I don’t even know I’ve done? We’re pretty smart guys Hermann, but even my God complex isn’t deluding me enough that I can manage that,” he replies angrily.

“Things will come back. And if they come back organically, you will be better off for it. Doctor Pedreira is of the opinion that-”

“You don’t even like Pedreira!”

“No, I don’t,” Hermann says patiently, “I don’t like Pedreira. But I like you very much.” He squeezes Newt’s knee. “And he is the expert. I trust him to act in the way that is most beneficial to you and your wellbeing.”

Newt falters.

“Is it a power thing? Do you just like the fact that you know more than me?”

Hermann inhales sharply, and if this were ten years ago, he would fire back a retort so hostile and scathing that Newt would be tip-toeing around him for a week before he had simmered down.

But he is different than how he was back then. And so is Newton. So he says nothing at all – though the silence is stern and unapologetically disapproving – and lets Newt calm down.

“I didn’t- I’m sorry. God I’m being such as asshole. That’s not- I know… I know that’s not what it is.” Newt’s tongue stumbles across the words, his brain trying to catch up with his tongue as it races ahead and jumbles the apology. The blood rushing through Hermann’s ears slows a little regardless, and he gives a nod only perceptible because of the proximity between them.

“I just- I know it’s not what the psychologists recommend or whatever, but I need to know,” Newton murmurs, his gaze trailing the line of Hermann’s jaw, “I need you to help me. I need you to… fill the gaps in for me. You’re the only person that can. You’re the only person that I trust to do it.”

Before Hermann can begin to feel touched at the sentiment, Newt ruins it.

“I mean technically you’re the only person that I actually have right now… God what happened to me? I used to be so popular.”

He snorts at the sight of Hermann’s raised eyebrows and even Hermann himself lets out a laugh.

“It must’ve been a very long time ago Doctor Geiszler. For as long as I have known you, I have not once seen statistical evidence to back up that claim.”

“Alright hot stuff, clam it,” Newt claps back facetiously, but it is the break in the conversation that they need. The edge melts away, and both of them are grinning wider than they have all afternoon.

Hermann takes a moment to consider the request. Of course, as Newton has rightly pointed out, the psychologists do know better. He is a doctor himself; he respects anyone who bears the title, and he acknowledges the superiority of their knowledge and advice over his own. But the situation they are dealing with is unprecedented. And beyond that, the _person_ they are dealing with is Newton Geiszler – really, the rule book should have been thrown out weeks ago.

The only thing on the planet that he wants is for Newt to recover; Hermann’s research contract at MIT has almost certainly blown away on the wind, and he dreads to imagine the state of his apartment. He hadn’t even cleared the fridge before leaving. He hasn’t had regular contact with his family since VE Day. Hermann supposes he has always known it (and buried it deep, _deep_ down), but in this moment the truth has never been clearer – Newton is all that he has too.

“How do you suppose we go about this?” he asks, defeated, and he can hear the relief pouring out of Newt like steam out of a boiled kettle, “Do you want me to provide you with a chronological overview, or would you like to ask certain question?”

“I was thinking you could show me,” Newt says, and the suggestion is tentative in the extreme, “I know… I know my head is a clusterfuck right now, but I think it might work.”

Hermann’s eyes widen.

“Newton, if you’re suggesting that we communicate via the Drift… It was a decade ago, and for mere minutes. That bond is not nearly strong enough for the kind of action you are proposing,” he replies, not aghast at the suggestion, but puzzled at how Newt – Kaiju biologist extraordinaire – thinks this could work.

“Except where pilots only Drift with each other, we Drifted with a Kaiju. We hacked into their hivemind; the kind of connection between our heads is totally different, and I think it’s _more_ than strong enough,” Newt replies, his voice taking on some of the excitement that Hermann recognises from midnight lab sessions back in Hong Kong just before a revelation, “Don’t pretend like you can’t still feel me inside your head. I can feel you. C’mon man, I promise I won’t look at your wank bank.”

“Newton,” Hermann splutters, trying not to react to that final sentence, “The last time I even attempted to Drift with your mind, I was repelled completely.”

“According to your logic, that was not _my_ mind though. And now that the Precursors have gone, it’s just me again.”

“I- I’m not sure how safe it will be,” Hermann says, and he sees Newton’s shoulders drop in disappointment, and is that… embarrassment? Shame?

“I know I’m asking a lot. I know I could hurt you-”

“No, you have the wrong end of the stick. Newton, your mind is fragile-”

“Hey so is my ego man, back off,” Newton interjects, trying to bring a bit of levity to the conversation, but Hermann pays him no heed.

“Your mind is fragile, and you are inviting me not only to walk into it, but to overload it with information that could prove to be highly distressing. The repercussions could be catastrophic,” Hermann counters, his tone verging on desperate – desperate for Newt to be reasonable about this.

A foolhardy ambition, if he is honest with himself.

“It’ll be fine, I promise,” Newt says, batting the air as if Hermann’s words were physical entities that he could ward off with his fists.

“You and I have always had vastly conflicting definitions of ‘fine’,” Hermann remarks snidely, but he knows he has lost. He does not have the capacity to deny this man anything. But one concern lingers.

“What if… what if you do not like what it is that you see?”

Newton smiles sadly at the carpet.

“Then at least I’ll have a reason to hate myself.”

It’s a terrible answer, and one that does little to quell his fears going into this frankly ridiculous mission, but Hermann understands it, even if he does not like it.

“Okay. I agree to participate in your ludicrous, nonsensical plan,” Hermann says, pulling himself to his feet via his cane. Newton jumps up too, shoving his glasses back onto his face. “How do we proceed from here? Do you need access to the engineering suites? I believe there are sufficient supplies in order for us to create a makeshift Pons.”

“Nah, I don’t think we need any machines,” Newt says, and Hermann realises with a start that this is something the man has been planning for some time now. A little part of him has the nerve to feel used, but the thought is immediately overpowered by the idea that he can actually _do_ something to help. Standing on the side-lines holding Newt’s hand is not something he regrets doing, but knowing he can _act_ … that is something else entirely.

“The way our Drift works,” Newt pauses, trying to put his theory into words, “I picture it like a circuit board under construction. Our wires are in place, we just need to solder them together. It doesn’t need to be a full neural connection, just enough for the images to pass across.”

“And how do you propose we ‘solder’ our brains?” Hermann asks, acting overly exasperated to hide his growing concern.

Newt leads them to his bed – unmade and covered in heaps of pillows, like the glutton for comfort he has always been – and gestures for Hermann to sit cross legged across from him in the centre of the mattress. It is not an overly comfortable position for his leg, but when he is in the Drift, he knows he will not feel it.

“Close your eyes,” Newt says gently, and Hermann obeys.

“Now, reach out for me.”

Hermann begins to lift a hand, shaking in anticipation, but Newt laughs softly, “No, I mean with your mind you doofus,” and he puts it down.

He searches for the tendrils that connect his mind to Newton’s, the live wires, that run through his head. He had become so accustomed to their presence as to have tuned them out almost completely in the past – the shock of being repelled by the Precursors had made him appreciate their presence all the more once they bled back. But ever since Newt has been in recovery, he has tried not to tug on the strands too harshly; he has tried to keep their minds separate, to prevent his feelings from spilling over. The sorrow, the grief, the immense and incredible amount of love, the _guilt…_

“There it is,” Newt says quietly, “I can feel you.”

_I feel you too. I always feel you._

Newt’s hand is suddenly clasped on the back of his neck, and he draws their foreheads together until they are resting against one another. He can feel the heat emanating from Newton’s head – or is it his? – and he pulls on the threads as hard as he can. Newt startles at the sensation, and winds his fingers through Hermann’s hair, pulling him as close as he can. Now it is the heat from his mouth that Hermann can feel, and ripples of goose bumps break out over his arms, thankfully hidden under his jumper.

“So now, just picture the memories that you want to show me,” Newt says, and Hermann nearly loses the connection with the shock of how close they are. He keeps his eyes tightly shut, and tries to focus. _Focus Hermann_ , he hears in his father’s strict voice, _focus or you’ll never achieve anything of import._

“Dude, please stop thinking about your dad,” Newt says breathlessly, but Hermann is getting glimpses of Newt’s own father through the link, of the man who skipped the last night of Hanukkah every year, and never bothered to dole out kind words to his son.

He hadn’t thought this kind of mental transference was possible. This is almost psychic, he thinks, bordering on magical. Incredible. So very, very _Newtonian_.

But he is here to do something in particular. And by El is it difficult to pull back the memories of when the man breathing just millimetres away from him was something else entirely. He doesn’t want to think of Newt like that- it hurts so much…

“Hermann, please,” Newt begs before leaning forward across the atoms that divide them and pressing his lips to his. The touch of his mouth, so familiar, so warm, so desperately wanted, lights the connection on fire.

Hermann doesn’t think about it, he just feels; he cups Newton’s face in his hands, kisses him for the first time in six years, and presses him down into the soft embrace of the mattress. The inside of his head is like Guy Fawkes Night, a dazzling array of colour and sound and light, and as he kisses him – wantonly, openly, grazing his tongue against Newton’s like it’s easier and more natural than breathing – the memories he wants to transpose bleed through. The images flash in his head, confused at first- _where are his glasses? Did he get laser eye surgery? He looks different without the glasses_ , but slowly growing more and more painful.

_Alice? He has an… Alice? Oh._

Hermann strokes a hand over Newt’s chest, his thumb rimming the top button of his shirt in promise. With the deft stroke of a finger, the button careens off and falls to the ground.

_What is he doing, working with this corporation? Newton would never sacrifice his scientific integrity in such a manner…_

_The curve of his mouth... How could I ever have left? How could I have looked at the curve of his mouth and wanted anything else?_

Newt whines into his mouth at that memory, a noise so scandalous that it goes straight to Hermann’s cock. His body is moving on its own, almost out of his control, and he feels his hips start to grind against Newt’s (and he feels it in reverse too, feels the backs of his legs against the mattress, his own weight on top of him, and _oh god_ ).

_This isn’t right. Newton with a gun. What has happened to him?_

_It’s okay, it’s okay now. There’s a kill switch. My clever boy._

Newt lets out another deep moan that leaves Hermann aching between his legs, fully hard against the zipper of his trousers. Newt is in the same position, and his mouth is beautifully wet against his, their lips sliding against one another in a very literal harmony.

_Newton. Newton. Why is he looking at me like that?_

They rut against one another faster now, the sensation too good to be delayed. They’re chasing it together, the sheer energy of the transference seeping into every cell in their bodies. Without need to stop for air, Hermann scrapes his teeth along Newton’s bottom lip, presses a hand against his cock and feels him there, absorbs the sound of Newt’s gasp into his own mouth-

_Newt. No. He wouldn’t do this-_

They move even more quickly, Hermann’s hand stroking Newt’s cock through his jeans and it feels as if the fabric doesn’t even exist. He is so close, so hot-

_Oh God, he’s going to kill us all-_

Hermann bites at his mouth and Newt bites right back-

_Is that… There’s something wrong-_

“Hermann, _mein Gott_ ,” Newt pants-

_That’s not Newt. It’s something else. No. No. Please no, it can’t have taken him. No. Not Newt. Anyone else but not him. He can’t be gone. He’s mine, he can’t be gone. Please please please please please please-_

“Please,” Newt breathes into his mouth, and they both come in the same fraction of a second; their minds light up like the eye of a nuclear explosion.

_I love you. Please don’t be gone. Please don’t have left me._

“Herm,” Newt says weakly as Hermann loses balance and sinks onto his chest, the pain in his leg returning as the connection dims. They breathe deeply, shattered physically, mentally, _religiously_ , by the experience. “Hermann… thank you. Thank you.”

He does not have the energy to respond. He feels utterly drained, limbless, unable to so much as waggle his toes. He can feel Newt’s stomach underneath him, rising and falling in line with his breathing, and he shifts so as to be lying next to him instead.

The night sky is filled with stars, and Hermann kisses Newt like they’re all going out.


	4. The Argument

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because of course, the peace between Hermann and Newt was never designed to last.

The peace does not last long.

The first post-Awakening Geiszler-Gottlieb screaming match takes place exactly 83 days into their stay at the facility. Newton’s name goes first in Hermann’s mental record of the event not because it is alphabetical but, because as far as he is concerned, it is _his_ fault.

The problem with having Newt back inside of his head is that he _never shuts up_. It isn’t something that Hermann feels in any way compelled to complain about – he has experienced the opposite, and it is something that he thinks will haunt him for a while longer yet – but it also means that the quiet he has become accustomed to over the years has disappeared without a trace. In time, they’ll be able to patch in some privacy screenings, make it so they are not constantly livestreaming every thought to one another, but for now, their proximity – both physical and mental – means that Hermann is there for every yawn, every song stuck in his head, every piss, every shower (and by jove… that had been an experience for the both of them), and, unfortunately for Newton, every private meeting with Rikushō Matsuo.

He is waiting outside of the Rikushō’s office on base, his narrow frame wedged awkwardly against the wall, facing out into the corridor. Numerous people have passed him on their way to the canteen or the cadet quarters, and all have given him a knowing glance, a surreptitious look, that makes him feel certain that something is being planned without his knowledge.

Given the summoning Newt received early this morning (that he slipped out of bed to attend without waking Hermann first), he expects to disapprove of it immediately.

He taps his left foot against the floor to the tune of _Nightclubbing_ , a tune that Newt has been psychically blasting out for the last two days or so. He finds the rhythm oddly comforting in a moment where he has been left in the dark. Again.

He has been waiting for nigh on an hour when Newt slips out of the door, anticipating his presence there. He is fidgeting, anxiety radiating off of him, and it only takes a look between them for Hermann to understand what is going on.

His eyebrows narrow. The lines on his forehead deepen as he frowns. He sees his face from Newton’s perspective – the image projected into his head, out of either of their control – and he looks livid.

“No.”

He rises from the chair somewhat unsteadily, but Newt grabs his upper arm before he can start to move. Despite the anger churning in his gut, he calms for a second, the pressure of his touch a relief.

“Let’s do this somewhere else, yeah?” Newt asks him, his eyes flitting about the place, his fingers sinking into Hermann’s arm as if they were digging for gold.

“As you wish,” Hermann states plainly, before wriggling out of Newt’s hold and barging into Matsuo’s occupied office.

The Rikushō does not look surprised to see him, but he does not look pleased either.

“Doctor Gottlieb, this is not a matter for-” he begins to say, rising from his chair, but Hermann interrupts him before he has the chance to finish.

“Rikushō Matsuo, I was wondering if Doctor Geiszler and I might borrow your office for a few minutes,” he says as politely as he possibly can – though, given how he is feeling right now, he doubts it comes out as anything less than positively feral.

Matsuo looks doubtful that he is going to return to his office and find it still in one piece, but he relinquishes the space with a careful nod of the head, and a searing look at Newt that makes Hermann’s hand tighten on the head of his cane.

As the Matsuo shuffles from the room, Newt hovers by the door, looking anywhere but at Hermann. He crosses his arms across his chest, flashing his faded Kaiju tattoos directly at him. Hermann loves them, because he loves _him_ , but even so, after all that has happened, he wishes he could scrub them all off.

He perches on the edge of Matsuo’s rigorously organised desk, and tries to ensure his sentences come out at a normal conversational volume and not a writhing yell.

“They want you to stay on here as the head of their Research and Development lab,” Hermann says, “And you’re going to say yes.”

Newt has the good grace to flush in embarrassment, but it does little to stop Hermann’s stomach from clenching in anger.

“And for some reason… some senseless, fatuous, selfish reason, you are not only going to say yes, but you think that it could in some way be a good idea,” he snarls, and _there it is_ , the loss of volume control. Newt winces at the tone, and Hermann glowers until the man finally speaks up and replies.

“What else am I supposed to do?” he asks, “Honestly Herm, what else am I going to do? Where am I going to go?”

“You’re the world’s foremost expert on Kaiju Biology; any university, think tank, publishing house would have you. You could write books, you could revolutionise academia-”

Newt scoffs, loudly.

“Are you being serious? I thought I was supposed to be the delusional one in this relationshi-” he doesn’t finish the word, and Hermann’s heart strains, “The delusional one out of the two of us.”

“I don’t understand why you seem to be under the impression-”

“I tried to end the world Hermann!” Newt shouts, and Hermann is hit with a mental wave of despondency and shame so strong that it nearly sends him reeling to the floor, “You _showed_ me your memories, of me trying to end the world. And if you saw it, then everybody else on the planet did too! So what do you expect me to do? Just go back out there and say ‘sorry everyone for the attempted genocide, please give me tenure’?! When they ask me about the gap on my CV just say ‘yeah I was possessed for a bit and tried to blow up the earth’?!”

His eyes are frenzied.

“This isn’t like last time. People aren’t lining up to meet me anymore – they’re lining up to kick my ass. The stupid Kaiju-groupie who couldn’t control himself and nearly got everyone killed. I haven’t got anywhere to go.”

“Newton-”

But he isn’t done yet.

“And if – big fucking if – everyone on the planet is happy to forgive and forget, what am I going to do? Start lecturing on the Precursors and then have a panic attack in front of an auditorium full of students? Relapse and fucking kill one of them? We still have no idea what the long-term effects of this… freaking _nightmare_ are going to be. I could be the most dangerous thing on the planet, and you want me to just head back to MIT like nothing has happened!”

Hermann’s mouth drops open at the sight of tears filling Newt’s eyes. The man angrily wipes them away, but they keep coming and Hermann has to stop himself from reaching out to him.

“Newton,” Hermann says firmly, before he can carry on shouting hysterically, “You have shown absolutely no signs of prolonged impairment from your… experience. The difficulties you have had with your memory and your moods are typical of a traumatic event. Over time, it will just come to be something that happened to you.”

“You know that that’s only because we are in a controlled environment,” Newton says accusingly, genuinely pointing a finger at Hermann, and suddenly they are back in Hong Kong in their damp lab and the whole world is falling apart, “Put me out there, in the street, and who knows what could happen. Here… here, I can use my knowledge to help protect people instead.”

“Here is where you were nearly killed, or did Matsuo not think to mention that to you,” Hermann snaps back angrily, unable to stop the bitter words from rolling off of his tongue, “That in here, they were making preparations to snap you out of existence because you were no longer useful?”

“I nearly killed _you_ out _there_!” Newt shouts back, so anguished and so heartbroken that the whole room seems to vibrate. Hermann’s cane slips from his hand and clatters against the floor – the noise it makes echoes around and around and around in the silence that follows.

“I… I didn’t realise I had shown you that,” Hermann says, his voice barely more than a whisper, “I didn’t want you to see that.”

Newt claps his hands against his cheeks and rubs his face, and then scratches a hand through his hair in frustration. He kicks at the floor with the toe of his right foot.

“And the thing is Herm, if I tried to kill _you…_ ” his voice breaks there “If they were able to convince me to try and kill _you_ , then convincing me to try and kill anybody else will be child’s play.”

“They’re gone Newton,” Hermann retorts, stammering at what has been left unsaid, “They’re not going to convince you to do anything. The connection is gone. The Precursors are _gone_.”

“If that’s true, then why is the UN funnelling billions into this place? Why have 196 countries unilaterally agreed to a common defence strategy? That’s literally unprecedented.” Newt pauses for a moment, wondering whether his next point is one worth making for all the damage he knows it will do. In the heat of the moment, he lets it out. “If it is so certain that they won’t ever come back, then why has _your dad_ , the great endorser of the Coastal Wall Programme, publicly come out and said, ‘You know what guys, I was wrong, let’s do our research’? Christ Hermann, if someone in your family has admitted to being wrong, it must be bad!”

Of all the things they have said to one another over the years, all of the arguments they have entertained, all of the shots they have slung about one another’s education, their degrees, their tastes and their behaviours, that might just be the worst.

Hermann feels himself physically recoil away from Newt, feels himself wanting to run and jump out of Matsuo’s window just to get away from him. The ground suddenly feels unsteady under his feet and he stumbles against the desk to regain his footing. The mention of his father turns the boiling of his blood into ice cold shock.

He would rather that Newton had struck him. He would rather the physical blow than this taunt.

“Herm, I didn’t mean to-” Newt stammers out, but his sentence dies when Hermann fails to interrupt him.

Hermann Gottlieb was the master of the silent treatment. He had developed it as a teenager – surrounded by idiots and bullies at his English boarding school – but it had come into its own as a fighting strategy upon meeting Newton Geiszler. Newt filled every silence he could – he talked to himself, he blasted music, he hummed, he whistled, he chewed gum and blew bubbles just for the noise that popping them made. He could not bear silence. So when they would have their weekly (daily, in the bleakest of times) bust-ups, Hermann would frequently utilise the silent treatment against him. He wasn’t particularly proud of it – especially as he began to understand just why Newt hated silence (and couldn’t _he_ of all people empathise with the scars of a lonely childhood) – but it was effective. It was childish, and it was effective.

Here, he wasn’t trying to be either of these things. He was just hurt.

“So, the Precursors come back, what will you be able to do about it from here?” Hermann asks, trying to keep his voice level.

Newton breathes out audibly, the relief from not being verbally bollocked into the sun evident on his face.

“If I’m here, then I can work on defensive programmes. Not just redesigning and repurposing the Jaeger outfit, but on biological weaponry. I’ve got a bioengineering PhD that I haven’t really used that could come in handy. We could think of new ways to repel them, and not just that, but new ways to take the fight to them instead. Stop them from tearing up half the world.”

“A very noble pursuit Doctor Geiszler,” Hermann says, not caring if he sounds derisive, “But are you sure that your staying here is about the good of the planet, or is it more about you being too scared to go back into the world?”

“That’s not fair Hermann,” Newt replies, and his tone is coloured with resentment, “If you had any idea-”

“I would say I have a very good idea of what it is like, Newton,” Hermann speaks over him, “Do not forget that Drifts go both ways. You may have seen inside my head, but I have seen inside of yours too. I know how scared you are.”

“No,” Newt says back, scathing, “No you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to roam around in my brain and pick out the worst bits and then throw them back at my face. That’s such a dick move man, don’t play it like that.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Hermann snaps, “Fine, we’ll stay here. But do not for one _second_ let your foolish little brain mistake my acquiescence for approval.”

Newt points his finger again, and if Hermann were a baser man, he would slap it away.

“That’s not fair Hermann and you know it! You don’t get to guilt trip me into doing what you want.”

“What’s not fair Newton is your proposal that I sit around and watch you live and work in an environment that nearly killed you!” Hermann yells, and it might just be the loudest he has ever shouted in his whole life, “We have given twenty years of our lives to these people. We have done _enough_!”

“Well nobody said you had to stay too!” Newt counters, and before he can even comprehend what he has said, Hermann has limped past him and out of the door.

Across their neurological connection, Hermann can just hear _shit, shit, shit, shit, shit_ going round and round in rotation, and he furiously tampers down on the line, trying to at least dim the sound of Newton’s voice in his head.

“Herm! Hermann!” he hears Newton calling down the corridor, and _for goodness’ sake_ , people are starting to stare at them now, and all he wants to do is sink into the floor and never be conscious again.

“Not now, Doctor Geiszler,” he hisses, seething, righteous anger already pooling in his stomach. And he really can’t do this now. Because if he breaks in front of all of these people, then he will never come back from it.

Newt seems to understand the depth of the situation, because he stops chasing after him instantly, and remains rooted to the spot. Hermann refuses to look back at him and starts pacing away as fast as his leg will allow him, until he reaches the confines of his room.

He slams the door behind him so hard that the cutting Newton had given him from the camellia bush in the garden teeters off the edge of his bedside cabinet and smashes to the ground.

 _If that isn’t a perfect metaphor_ , Hermann thinks, and it is the last rational thought in his head before he lays down and dreams of wading through the ocean, two hundred feet high, before he suddenly crashes to the ground with his lover’s hand wrapped tightly around his throat. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Should I just apologise now or...


	5. The Ablution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt has just enough emotional intelligence to know that he owes Hermann an apology. Whether or not Hermann has enough to accept it is another question entirely...

Hermann awakens with a start several hours later, the sun setting behind a vast swarth of clouds outside. He narrowly avoids setting his foot down in the pile of jagged ceramic next to his bed, and rests his head in his hands.

The one thing in his life he has never been able to bear is feeling like an idiot. And yet here he is, all over again.

It doesn’t take long for him to pack. The only things he has acquired in the past six months are clothes – out of necessity, not luxury – and a few cassette tapes, a pile of books, and some rare flora that he can’t take back with him anyway. He finds his laptop and his mobile abandoned in the bottom of his bag; neither have been used regularly since he arrived here, and for a moment, Hermann is struck by the question of how exactly he has been passing the time at the facility. He cannot remember a period in his life before all of this where he had not been drowning in equations. And yet being here with Newt had caused him to not even notice their absence.

He will buy a plane ticket at the airport, he decides, tucking his passport into the inner pocket of his parka coat; if he asks nicely, one of the boys in the transport department will take him to Narita; nobody will notice his absence for a little while, and even then he doubts anyone will really mourn his loss.

Newton will. He has felt enough of him in the Drift to know that. But he won’t forever. It’ll be like last time – the pain will fade, and he will move on, and Hermann will have his regrets but ultimately be better off.

_Better off_ , he thinks, unconsciously pursing his lips, _indeed._

He turns on his phone, and nearly turns it off again when he sees his call log: over one hundred missed calls from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, twenty-two from his sister, fifteen from his mother. One from his father.

He scans quickly through his texts and his emails, and then deletes both inboxes en masse. If it’s important, they’ll let him know when he gets back.

Hermann briefly considers returning his father’s call, but ultimately decides against it. This day has been difficult enough. It would be an act of outright masochism to purposefully worsen it.

He picks up his bag and slings it across his left shoulder, when he hears loud and deliberate knocking.

“ _Scheiße_ ,” he mutters under his breath. He should have known this was not going to go without a hitch. But because he is feeling argumentative, he calls out, “Who is it?”

“It’s freaking housekeeping, I’m here to hoover your room and steam your underwear,” Newt replies sarcastically, but even Hermann isn’t emotionally dense enough to miss the anxious undercurrent in his words, “Let me in Herm. C’mon man.”

For a second, Hermann considers scaling down the side of the building to escape, until his leg twinges and he disgruntledly opens the door instead.

Newton looks an absolute wreck. If Hermann didn’t know any better, he would think he had been Drifting with the monsters again – his eyes are ringed dark red, his skin pallid, bordering on translucent. He had climbed back up to his normal weight since the Awakening, but even so in this light he looks so _small_. The sight of him like this, so akin to the way he had looked with that _thing_ inside of him threatens to extinguish Hermann’s anger like foam over fire.

Forgiveness had never been his strong suit until he had met Newton Geiszler, and even then, he seemed to be the exception that proved the rule.

“Where are you going?” Newt asks, and he sounds like he has been punched in the gut.

“I’m leaving,” Hermann replies, hoping the less he says, the less likely it is that he will change his mind, “It has been made clear that my presence here is no longer required.”

To his credit, the last vestiges of blood left in Newton’s face disappear. He looks almost hollow, staring at Hermann in utter disbelief – a puzzle that he truly cannot figure out how to solve.

“Don’t,” he whispers, and his voice is hoarse, the words struggling to escape as his throat tightens, “Don’t even joke about that.”

“I do not joke, Doctor Geiszler,” Hermann says, taking a step forward and closing his room door behind him.

“You cannot be serious… I can’t- I can’t believe you’re doing this to me again,” Newton cries out, and his voice sounds so pained that it sends a shiver up Hermann’s spine that he has to forcibly suppress.

Hermann pushes past him, taking advantage of the shock that seems to have paralysed Newt entirely, but before he can reach the end of their private corridor, Newt has caught up to him, and he yanks him backwards by the shoulder and grips the inner lining of his blazer to stop him from wriggling free.

“You have got a problem man,” he says, eyes gleaming, “The moment I fuck up, you cut me off straight away. I don’t get a chance to say sorry, to explain myself, I’m just gone from your life. Do you have any idea how that feels? To say something or do something wrong… and to not even be given a second chance? I’ve been part of your life for twenty years and you’re going to leave me just like that because I said something stupid, like that’s not basically my whole personality.”

“You didn’t just ‘say something stupid’,” Hermann says sharply, “You said you didn’t need me here. Given that you are the only reason I was ever here in the first place, I find it logical to take my leave of you.”

“I didn’t say that!” Newt shouts back, waving his arms in the air in frustration, “Or I did. But I didn’t mean it. I could never mean that, not when it’s you.”

“You cannot expect me to infer these things-”

“For Christ’s sake Hermann, I was coming to apologise! That’s what I’m doing here! Right now!” Newt seems to be in a state of disbelief bordering on hysteria. “I’ve spent the last five hours trying to come up with the perfect apology, and you’re trying to flee the country! Can’t you see how fucking pathological that is? _Conflict resolution_ man, do you not remember the workshops Pentecost made us go to?”

That had been an interesting experience. After the first two months of their sharing a lab had ended in nine separate complaints being filed at the Hong Kong Shatterdome, the Marshal had “suggested” they attend a series of workshops about overcoming conflict in the workplace. Given that they did not speak to one another for a month at the culmination of the sessions, neither could advocate for their efficacy. Although, Hermann had supposed at the time, Newton had stopped playing music in the lab after 8PM, and he had started bringing him coffee when he was clearly flagging, and he had made the effort to check in with his projects more often…

Hermann, on the other hand, had carried on being a miserable bastard for the next two years at least.

“I am _so_ sorry for what I said. It was stupid and untrue and something that came out in a fit of anger,” Newton says, tugging Hermann closer to him, his hand still desperately clenching onto his coat, terrified that he will scarper, “I don’t want you to leave. I couldn’t- I wouldn’t be of any use to anyone if you left. I’m nothing without you.”

“I can’t be here to make you whole Newton,” Hermann murmurs, “I- I can’t do that for you.”

_How can I do that when it’s my fault that you’re broken? I’m not enough._

“You already have! You brought me back to life,” Newt cries back, “And now you’re just going to leave? Is it that easy for you? Do I really mean that little to you?”

Newt has about half a second to regret asking that question before Hermann sees red, throws his bag off of his back and slams Newt against the door of his room in an uncharacteristic display of strength.

“You mean _everything_ to me,” he seethes, their faces so close that he can feel the heavy pants of Newton’s breath on his mouth, “You are everything to me. I don’t give a damn about a single thing on this planet except for you.”

He can feel his whole body shaking, and it takes him a few moments to realise that he has Newt pinned by the throat. He can feel his pulse – racing, flustered and aroused and terrified – underneath his thumb, and he resists the urge to stroke at the vein lying just below the skin, resists the urge to follow it under the folds of his shirt and trace it back to his heart.

He lets go of Newt’s neck, a little startled at the lividness of the marks that his fingers have left, but fascinated by the contrast of deep crimson on ivory. He stares and stares and tries to keep his tongue inside of his mouth. Newt’s breathing is all over the place, and Hermann thinks he might have gone too far until Newt grasps his hand inside his, and brings it back up to his throat, and peels his fingers out from his palm one by one until they are back in position.

“Do it,” he breathes out, “Please Hermann.”

“Newton, I do not need… I do not want retribution,” Hermann stutters, ghosts of this moment but in reverse haunting his mind.

He chose theoretical pursuits against his father’s wishes because even as a child he knew he could not cope with the responsibility of another’s pulse, and all that comes with protecting it. He has never held life in his hands, not least one as precious as this. It isn’t that he is reluctant – he is _unworthy_. 

And Newt is just _looking_ at him in utter reverence, beseeching, with Hermann as the divine altar of his worship.

“I can’t just re-trace the lines of my old life Hermann,” he whispers back, lifting his hand and brushing his thumb against Hermann’s bottom lip, “I need to redraw the image completely. Please _help me_.”

_I need you to help me make it all okay_ , he hears across the Drift, and it makes him feel brave.

Hermann has taken him to bed enough times to know the exact shape of Newt’s erection against his hip, and he can feel it now, pressing into him, craving his touch. He steps closer, his nose brushing against Newt’s, and tightens his grip ever so slightly on his neck – enough that he feels Newton solidly gulp against him.

“Inside,” he murmurs. _This is too private for other eyes. This is too intimate for anyone else but us to see._

He presses Newt back up against the door, only this time on the other side of it, and reaches up towards his neck once more. He is not a strong man, but he could still break him like this, could still stop his heart beating. Newt trusts him not to, and it nearly overpowers him.

He takes a second to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness in his room. The only source of light is from the brightening moon outside, and it does not yet pour through the window – it merely casts their shadows onto the wall adjacent to them.

Even the hazy outline of their bodies is obscene.

“Do you want me to take you apart Newton?”

Newt makes a sound unlike anything he has ever heard – one that sends a jolt of electricity straight to his groin – but he asks again, needing to hear him say the words.

“Yes,” Newt eventually manages to say, “ _Please_ , yes.”

It’s not like this is the first time they have done this. But Hermann’s hand tremors as he reaches down and undoes the buckle of Newt’s jeans, and slowly pulls down on the zipper. He tries to control his breathing, to not give away just how affected he is, but he makes the mistake of resting his forehead against Newt’s, and his feelings flood uncontrollably through the Drift. Newt gasps at the vision, the wanton lust, the bare _desire_ , and he snakes a hand round to rest on Hermann’s ass, using the little mobility he has to lure him in further.

Newt’s eyes roll back in his skull when Hermann’s hand – hands he has always loved, hands that made him believe he was a pianist when they first met for how delicate and shapely and strong they were – reaches down inside his underwear and encloses around his length, releasing him from the restrictive material. The cold air in the vacant room makes Newt shiver, and Hermann runs a thumb along the goose bumps that rise on his neck.

Hermann holds him like that for a few seconds, too overwhelmed by the sight before him to move, before he begins to trail his hand slowly up and down his shaft, thumbing the very tip of Newt’s cock just to watch his mouth fall open in euphoria at the sensation. When Newt arches his back against the door, pushing into Hermann’s touch, mentally crying out for more through the Drift, Herman bites down on his lower lip.

“Patience is a virtue darling,” he says, pressing the words into Newt’s skin, mouthing against the hollow of his throat. He is delectable, delicious, ripe for eating, and he feels Newt swallow beneath his fingertips.

He squeezes and releases Newt’s throat with every stroke of his cock until the man is whimpering for relief in his ear. All that he can hear over the Drift are garbled unfinished sentences, breathless need and the word _please_ playing on repeat to the most glorious beat. Hermann can feel his own erection straining at the fabric of his trousers, and he rubs against Newt’s upper thigh – still enclosed in denim – to feel a semblance of relief, the starchy fabric the perfect contrast.

This isn’t about him though. It’s about Newt. It’s about making him realise that he is _everything_.

He presses down on his pulse too hard on purpose and Newt’s knees nearly give out before Hermann hooks his good leg around one of his and keeps him propped up. Newt doesn’t gasp for breath, but his eyes find Hermann’s, and suddenly all he can hear through the Drift is an echoing chorus – angelic, celestial, Heaven-sent – of _I love you, I love you, I love you._

Hermann can’t help himself. He lets go of Newt’s throat, but before the man can swallow in the gulp of air he needs, Hermann kisses him hard and desperate and it is as much a declaration of love as it is an apology. _I’m sorry for leaving,_ he whispers through the Drift, unable to stem the surge of guilt, _I’m sorry I left you. I’m sorry I let this happen to you._

Newt’s mouth is south and pliant and forgiving under his, and Hermann lays his hand on his face and explores the gentle curves of his cheekbones as they move against one another. It feels so good – always has – to be this close to him. To be so near as to inhale his scent with every breath, to be able to touch where no one else is permitted. He feels the desire to tug on Newt’s hair weigh heavy in his stomach, but when his fingertips reach his hairline, they merely brush through instead – gentle and tender and sentimental.

Newton must feel it, that poignant longing, because he angles away from his mouth long enough to say, “Never leave me again. Promise me.”

Hermann nods, dives back in regardless, etches the words “I promise” into his lips. He doesn’t just mean it – he believes it, more than he has ever believed anything else in his life. Science, data, figures – they are constant, easily trusted; Newton Geiszler is the opposite – an erraticism, a man that he knows inside and out and still cannot predict, and yet here he is, believing in him more than any fact he has ever learned.

Newt kisses him with a ferocity that he had not anticipated, and Hermann groans into his mouth when his own belt buckle is undone. Newt’s fingers dip into his flesh, and he rolls his hips against Hermann’s – provocative as ever – and then grasps their cocks together and _moves_.

The sudden wave of ecstasy shocks him, like a volt of electricity through a coil, and he bucks against Newt, splaying a hand against the door for balance. He tongues the inside of Newt’s mouth, wet and slick and welcoming, and hisses as Newt curls his hand around his cock and squeezes ever so slightly. He can feel the dance of Newt’s fingertips over his length, and has to bite down on his own tongue to stop himself from teetering over the edge too soon.

That desire is forgotten when Newt drags his mouth along the angular jut of his jawbone and _licks_ the skin there before lightly scraping his teeth over his earlobe. The vague thought that he was supposed to be in control floats across the back of his mind, and he can hear the faint echo of Newt’s laughter in response. He sucks at the bit of skin behind Hermann’s ear as he strokes their lengths together, gradually increasing the speed until they are both choking out for breath, the door rattling in the frame behind them.

“Fuck, I love you,” Newt pants when Hermann’s hand curls around his waist and his fingernails dig into his hip, “Fuck. Hermann. I love you.”

Hermann comes with what sounds like a sob, spilling into Newt’s hand and slumping against him, and he senses across the Drift that it is the mere sight of him – feral, unhinged, utterly in love – that undoes Newt too.

They are not young men anymore, and it takes them both more than a few seconds to recuperate; it slightly unravels the sincerity of the moment when Hermann begins to chuckle at just how steamed up Newt’s glasses are. Newt kisses him in retaliation, and then again, and then again once more, until he eventually puts his hands on Hermann’s shoulders and starts steering him towards the bed.

“Shit!” Newt exclaims suddenly, and Hermann nearly jumps out of his skin in surprise, “Shit, I think I’ve stepped in some glass or something. Dude why is there glass on your floor?”

_That bloody camellia plant._

“Are you okay?” Hermann asks uselessly, wrapping his arm around Newt’s waist and helping him hoist himself up on the side of the bed.

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine,” Newt says back, sporting a wide grin, “Unless you wanna kiss it better?”

Hermann makes a face and Newt laughs so loudly that he is sure Matsuo can hear it in his office across the facility.

“If I ever go anywhere near your feet, let me assure you now it is because the world is ending,” he says drily, but he still lays Newt down on his bedsheets and soaks in the image of him, his jeans round his ankles but his shirt still miraculously in place.

“Ooh talk dirty to me,” Newt huffs back, and they both laugh.

It will take a long time for him to be able to fine-tune Newton’s thoughts inside of his head, to be able to sort through them and turn them down until they become white noise. He thinks he might just miss them though, because all he can hear at the moment is _he looks so beautiful when he laughs. I’m going to make him laugh every day for the rest of my life._

Hermann gulps, and lies down next to Newt, never more than millimetres away.

“Herm we look ridiculous,” Newt whispers, gesturing towards their state of semi-undress, “Take your shirt off.”

“You take it off,” Hermann replies childishly, tiredness beginning to seep into his bones now that he has made contact with his mattress.

The springs in the mattress contract, and then Newt is sat on top of him, groin to… _ah,_ very _sensitive_ groin, and his fatigue instantly abates.

“It would be my honour Doctor Gottlieb,” he says smartly, and slips his glasses off of his nose and onto the bedside cabinet.

Hermann’s heartbeat increases rapidly at the sight; Newt’s glasses coming off is the equivalent of a tie on the doorknob. It has only been a few minutes since their mutual orgasm, and yet he can feel himself stirring again already, the anticipation coursing through him.

Newt undoes Hermann’s shirt buttons slowly, savouring every movement; after the front ones are all open, he undoes the cuffs of his sleeves, thumbs his delicate wrists and presses his mouth to the veins there, kissing the clusters of freckles that cover his hands. Hermann shifts himself onto his elbows so Newt can push his shirt off of his shoulders, baring the skin there, and he has never felt more exposed, more naked. Newt is drinking him in like this is their first time, his gaze transfixed, spellbound by the sight of his lean shoulders and his stark white skin in the moonlight. 

“You are something else,” Newt says in a strangled voice, “Herm, you are so beautiful.”

He strips Hermann of his shirt entirely, and proceeds to pull his trousers off from around his ankles. The only thing left is his underwear, and Hermann tries to tamp down the euphoria that he feels when Newt wriggles his fingers under the waistband and yanks them off in one swift motion.

“This is becoming rather unequal Doctor Geiszler,” he murmurs, fingering the buttons of Newt’s shirt, still firmly fastened, “Do you think you might rectify the situation?”

_Show me_ , he projects across the Drift, _show me slowly_.

Newt understands. He leans down and kisses the corner of Hermann’s mouth, but then retreats, draws back until he is sitting atop his hips at a perfect right angle, his back arched and his narrow shoulders tipped away from him.

He loses the top button first, and the sight is nothing short of scandalous. In this position, Newt is illuminated in starlight, the state of his hair screaming debauchery. Lust pools in Hermann’s stomach as he catches sight of the bruises adorning his neck – he can see the exact indentation of his fingers, could calculate the precise diameter and circumference of his handprint. He can see just how completely Newton Geiszler belongs to him.

Another button is released, and then another, until Hermann is positively trembling at the sight. He is stunning, glorious, enough to make him believe in _Elohim_ again because how could Newt be the result of chance? How could anything so perfect come from evolution and not design?

“Do you mind not thinking about the _eloah_ whilst I’m getting naked?” Newt teases, and Hermann feels himself blushing, “It’s giving me throwbacks to Hebrew School.”

“Less talking, more undressing,” Hermann snipes back, rolling his hips deliberately until he feels Newton’s thighs clench around his waist.

“Don’t… don’t do that,” he whines, and Hermann lets a smile rest upon his mouth.

As Newt slips out of his shirt, his tattoos come into full view. Hermann had discovered last week that they now stretched across his chest, blue and orange and fuchsia and acid green – all the colours of his dreams, etched into the skin of this man above him.

Newt makes a concerted effort to take off his underwear in an alluring way, but gets them caught around one of his ankles and has to roll off of Hermann for a moment just to get rid of the fabric. Hermann wheezes with laughter until Newt shuts him up with a kiss.

“You’re so mean,” he complains, but then Hermann’s hand is on the small of his back, pulling him closer, and he retracts the comment almost immediately.

Hermann kisses him slowly, languishing in the feeling of their mouths sliding against one another in movements so well-choreographed he could swear they have been practicing for years. _We had been,_ he thinks, _a long time ago_. The thought is almost enough to make him sad, but then Newt’s tongue is in his mouth and he remembers that they have plenty of time to play catch up. His moves his hips in a steady rhythm, and it doesn’t take long before Newt is surging back against him, matching his movements, begging for more.

Hermann kisses him back until his jaw starts to ache, and something else lower down does too.

“I’m gonna ride you, is that okay?” Newt says against his neck, pressing kisses against his jaw, and Hermann seems only able to nod in approval, which Newt finds all kinds of amusing.

“I’ve got- in my pocket,” Newt continues, and he jumps off of the bed quickly to raid his cache of supplies. Hermann feels a chill run through him at the loss of body contact – he had forgotten that Newton ran _that_ hot against him – but it lasts only seconds.

He stares Newton down, and nudges his hand against the little bottle in his hand.

“How presumptuous of you,” he says lowly, raising an eyebrow.

Newt has the good grace to look embarrassed for about half a second before he lets out a little breathless laugh.

“No, I simply made a hypothesis using the evidence I had available.”

“And that evidence being…?”

“That I am totally in love with you,” he declares, and Hermann has to try very hard to not cry at that, “And that after everything we’ve been through together, that you might forgive me.”

“A big leap Doctor Geiszler,” he says, but he is too obviously enamoured for it to come across teasingly. When it came to Newt, the way he feels has always been written plainly across his face. He had been surprised it had taken them as long as it had to sort their feelings out, the first time around.

“If you’ve got a problem with the methodology, I suggest you put it in writing,” Newt counters, delighted, and he chuckles into Hermann’s mouth when the man replies, “I intend to.”

Never one to back down.

The next twenty minutes test Hermann’s self-control more than any other moment of his life. The noises that come out of Newt as he opens him up are… _intolerable_ … _unbearable_ … _ridiculously arousing_ , and he is painfully hard within minutes of the endeavour. The longer it goes on, the stronger the Drift connection becomes, and soon Hermann can feel the shadow of Newton’s fingers inside of him, and he nearly bites straight through his lip at the sensation. Newton seems to sense that he is already close, because he quickly lowers himself onto Hermann with a loud cry and starts to move.

Neither of them last long.

Newton is loud, fast and uncompromising, and it’s all Hermann can do to strain his head back into the pillows and hold onto his hips for dear life.

“Newton, darling, darling,” is all he is able to say, his voice nothing more than an exhale, and Newt is hardly managing anything more advanced, instead just uttering a long, continuous stream of “ _yes, fuck, so good, yes, Herm, yes_.”

Newt does most of the moving – Hermann loves him like this, but his leg prevents him from being too adventurous – but even so, Hermann is soon panting for breath, desperately inhaling just to stop himself from blacking out from the sheer pleasure of it. He is trying _so hard_ not to come, but he makes the mistake of opening his eyes to the sight of Newton totally bare, bathed in moonlight, and riding him as if his life depends on it, and he knows he is doomed.

He unravels quickly, and, again, Newt follows within seconds. He takes a few seconds to catch his breath, and then manoeuvres himself off of Hermann and into the bed next to him, with a pump of his fist that shouts _victory_.

It’s a testament to how exhausted he is that Hermann makes no move to clean them off – instead, he rolls onto his side and wraps his arm around Newt’s flushed body, leaning over his shoulder to kiss the side of his mouth. They are both damp with sweat, but he doesn’t mind it at all. He couldn’t bear to wash Newton off of his skin in this moment.

“I love you Herm,” Newt whispers, “Even when I was someone else, I loved you.”

Hermann clutches him just a little bit tighter.

“I love you too Newt,” he murmurs, and he feels the man’s smile against his chest. _Finally_ , he hears through the Drift, _took you long enough_.

Newt tangles his legs through his – a way to ensure that he doesn’t try to escape during the night, he supposes – and Hermann huffs a little, and then strokes his hair as he drifts off. Before ten minutes have passed, he can feel the small exhales of Newt’s breath on his skin, and he finally feels home again.

As he falls asleep himself, Hermann theorises that they could write a paper on Drift neurological connectivity and sexual compatibility, if all other areas of their research fail. He imagines that it would be a very popular read.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter should be up by next Friday, but I am still writing.... it's gonna be a long one I think....


	6. The Assimilation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt and Hermann leave Japan, and face a brand new start with nothing holding them back.

It rains the day that they leave Japan.

If Hermann were irrational enough to be superstitious, he would consider it a bad omen, but after the last year of his life, he’ll be damned if a little bit of bad weather puts their plans on hold.

Unfortunately, he cannot say the same for Newton – the man who used to spit three times at the mention of creationism, and who, for ten years, refused to walk under the ladder on Hermann’s side of the lab (even when his own side was contaminated with so many radioactive isotopes that it had tripped a full-scale evac of the Shatterdome).

Newt’s nerves sit in the back of Hermann’s head like a migraine, and he tries to concentrate on his physical reality – in particular, the way Newt’s left hand is currently crawling its way across his knee. They are currently trapped in Matsuo’s office, finalising therapy releases and other formal paperwork – including, of course, the great and bountiful NDA, despite most of the PDCC’s current investigations being based on _their work_ in the first place.

The level of intimacy Newton is displaying in public – his fingertips stroking at the dip of his patella – is something Hermann would’ve shaken off with embarrassment before. Now he relishes the touch and all the casual possessiveness that it portrays. _Mine_ , the gesture says, _back off_.

He catches Newt’s distracted eye, and gives him an encouraging smile. Newt removes his hand from his leg and laces his fingers with Hermann’s in response, stroking his thumb against the taut skin of his palm.

Newton’s hand is warm in his, and he is perfect.

“Where is it that you have decided upon?” the Rikushō asks, snapping the two of them out of their reverie.

“Melbourne,” Hermann answers, “Not forever, but just for now.”

It had taken weeks to decide. Neither had come into the discussion with specific criterium regarding their future destination; Hermann had merely stipulated somewhere warm for his leg, and Newt had insisted on being by the ocean. “Just in case”, he had said, and Hermann had not been able to justify telling him no.

_“I don’t want to go back to Massachusetts,” Newt added in as the list had narrowed, and Hermann felt himself agreeing without argument. Something about going back there felt wrong; the very idea of it made him cringe. Massachusetts had been where they had built the bricks of their first home, and then pulled them all down too. It would be a sacrilege to return to somewhere so tainted._

_“Understandable,” Hermann said in lieu of his rambling explanation, “MIT aren’t best pleased with me, so perhaps we ought to look elsewhere.”_

_An understatement. Hermann had finally conceded and called the Dean a few weeks ago, only to be informed that his contract with the institution was certainly not going to be renewed. Something about failing to fulfil contractual requirements for twelve months…_

_“Dumbasses”, Newton called them, “Imagine getting Hermann Gottlieb on your teaching roster and then firing him. Top engineering school in the world my ass.”_

_Hermann didn’t agree, but the sentiment made him laugh all the same._

“And you’ll be teaching?” Matsuo asks him, and Hermann considers whether the man is playing at politeness, or if he is truly interested.

“At the University, yes.”

“And you, Doctor Geiszler?”

Newt falters, and Hermann grips his hand a fraction tighter.

“Nah, not for me. I’m going to take a break from the whole research thing for a while. Maybe I’ll write poetry or erotica or something.”

Hermann splutters, and Matsuo gives out a short chuckle. 

“I’m glad that you have found your sense of humour again, Doctor Geiszler,” he comments, and for all of the man’s historic obfuscations, it sounds genuine, “And I hope you will not be averse to the occasional call or email from our Research and Development laboratory?”

“If you get stuck, you know where I am,” Newt confirms quickly before Hermann can even attempt to butt in.

Staying in contact with the base remains – and likely will do so for the rest of their natural lives – an issue of major contention.

They sign all the relevant paperwork in silence (though both grit their teeth at the NDA) and as the clock on the wall strikes eleven, they find that a whole year of their lives has been wrapped up and filed away with nothing holding them back.

Hermann feels both elated and terrified. Though never a home, the base had become somewhat of a sanctuary – the soothing balm both of them had needed to heal wounds old and new. And whilst he had always known that they couldn’t hide here forever, something about having Newton in this place – safe, secure, away from the foul extremities of the real world – had made him feel more worthy as a protector, more worthy as a lover.

But his concerns run deeper than that. Like Newt had argued so well, the base is a dependent variable, a controlled environment. Melbourne, on the other hand, is a bustling city teeming with people ( _Australians at that_ , Hermann had complained when Newton had first suggested it), with potential triggers around every street corner.

_“It’ll be like that wherever we go though,” Newt said, snatching the laptop from Hermann’s arms and settling in between his legs. He leant back against Hermann’s chest, wriggling into the warmth of his body, “C’mon dude, you’re the one who’s desperate to leave. Melbourne has one of the best universities in the world, it’s hot, it’s got awesome beaches, the aquarium has those Gentoo penguins that you like…”_

_“I regret telling you that,” Hermann huffed, but he knew a lost cause when he saw one. Truth be told, it wasn’t been a debate he minded losing too much._

“Well, we best be on our way,” Hermann says, rising to his feet. He gives Matsuo a small bow – a warranted show of respect, despite the treatment Newton had received at the beginning of his time here – but Newt practically leaps across the man’s desk to shake his hand.

“Honestly can’t thank you enough man,” he says exuberantly, and Matsuo seems surprised, “You did what I would’ve done if it had been me- well, it _was_ me, if I had been in your shoes… you know what I mean. Thanks. And thanks for not killing me to start with, because that would’ve been a hell of a lot easier! And thanks for having us here as well, and for not kicking him out” – he gestures at Hermann with his thumb – “when he was walking about shouting at you all and calling you idiots. He didn’t mean it.”

Hermann shoots daggers at Newt, who winks in response. Matsuo claps Newt on the shoulder in an unexpected display of comradery, and says, quietly enough that Hermann can’t quite hear him, “It is okay. I was injured in one of the first Kaiju attacks in 2014, and my wife was the same with the hospital staff.”

Hermann doesn’t know why Newt is laughing quite so rambunctiously, but he is sure that it cannot be good. In absolute horror, he watches as Newt _fist bumps_ one of the highest-ranking lieutenant generals in Japanese military history, before slinking across the office to his side.

“Shall we?” he asks, and despite his slight mortification at Newt’s inability to behave like a grown-up, Hermann looks down and sees the whole world in his eyes.

“We shall.”

They pass Pedreira in the corridor, who stops only to give them both a firm handshake and a purposeful nod of the head, before carrying on as if he had stopped merely to tie his shoelaces. His lab coat blows out from behind him as he turns a corner, and Hermann can’t help but think something along the lines of _pretentious buffoon._

Newton, ever socially adept, hears the insult across the Drift and loudly asks, “Why did you never like him exactly?” whilst Pedreira is still in earshot. He clears his throat awkwardly, but dutifully answers as they head towards the vehicle storage lot where one of the cadets is ready to drive them – and the one suitcase they have between them – to Narita.

“I didn’t like the way he spoke about you,” Hermann reveals slowly, hesitant to unleash this kind of sentiment so early in the day, “He talked about you like you were a lab rat, an exciting progression in one of his experiments. He was enthusiastic about the data and the results he could extract from you. I found it distasteful and… unprofessional.” His cane clatters against the metal staircase as they approach the building’s exit, and he briefly holds onto Newt’s forearm for stability.

“Oh,” says Newton contemplatively, “I thought it was because he called you the Widower?”

Hermann stops dead on the staircase.

“He _what?!”_

“Woah Herm, don’t shoot the messenger,” Newton replies, holding his hands up in mock surrender and trying to keep the laugh he so desperately wants to let out behind his teeth, “I thought you knew!”

A lot of the memories he has of being in the laboratory whilst Newt was… elsewhere… suddenly make a lot more sense in his head.

“Anyway, I think it’s kind of sweet! I like the idea of you hanging around all mopey and sad because I’m not there.”

He shoulder bumps Hermann gently, but it’s not something that Hermann is willing to laugh about just yet. He pauses before they enter the lift that will take them down to the parking lot, and hooks a finger around Newt’s cuffed sleeve to reel him back in.

“Let me be very clear Newton,” he says softly, all the humour of the moment fading away, “That it was not a case of my being ‘mopey and sad’. I should have you know that the world without you in it is very dark indeed. I would – and will – do anything to prevent it from happening again.”

Newt gulps, and Hermann watches as his cheeks warm slightly. He doesn’t mean it as a reprimand, and Newt knows that – it is a promise. Hermann might not be too quick on his feet, and he might be only one man, but in that moment, Newt really understands just how much hell he would raise to keep him safe.

“Me too,” Newt exhales quietly, “No, I mean, you too. I’d do anything for you too. Anything. I’d even solve the Riemann hypothesis.”

“Newton, that hypothesis is _unsolvable-”_

“And yet the guy holding the gun to your head is asking me to solve it, so I’ll solve it man!”

“In what world would that scenario unfurl?” Hermann asks in exasperation, though he is already struggling not to laugh.

“Hey when I was a kid, I didn’t foresee robots fighting giant aliens and it happened; the lesson is, we should never try and predict the future.”

Hermann kisses him in the lift then, softly, slowly, with a ridiculous smile on his face.

“Understood. Thank you for your offer of protection Doctor Geiszler,” he murmurs, and Newt slips his arm around his waist as they walk out of the lift and towards the jeep.

Neither say a word as they are driven off of the premises, and only Newton strains his neck taking one last look. From the dirt road leading them out into the big wide world, the facility doesn’t look like much of anything – in fact, it looks as though it was purposefully designed to appear abandoned, constructed with concrete slabs from across a maudlin grey spectrum, with large windows that give it a totally vacant look.

And yet it is the place where life had been unexpectedly returned.

Hermann feels a distinct pang of anxiety in his stomach, but he knows that it is not his. He takes Newton’s hand and brushes his lips against his knuckles.

The drive to Narita takes a little under three hours, and once Newton’s uneasiness starts to abate, Hermann lets him ramble about Iggy Pop’s 1977 Australian tour, and how excited he is to visit the Melbourne Music Vaults, and how he’s going to have to restart his music collection because he’s still not sure where he used to live ( _“Tokyo,” he narrowed it down to, “One of…6.8 million apartments in Tokyo…”_ ) nor, indeed, where any of his possessions might be. Hermann half listens as Newt talks about which records he is going to search for first – “ _Never Mind the Bollocks, obviously, but I really need to replace my Sticky Fingers LP, I can’t_ believe _I’ve lost that, it was limited edition, the sleeve had a real zipper on it, it was so cool”_ – and diverts the rest of his attention to looking out of the window and trying to guess whether or not he will long for Japan once they have gone. It is a tumultuous thought that tumbles around inside his head, and as they pull into the arrivals zone at the airport, he remains unsure.

Newton is still talking, but Hermann is reluctant to ask him to stop; it is no longer the case that Newt talks to fill painful silences, nor to irritate him into an argument as he had so often done during the War; it is rather that his enthusiasm for the small joys in life has finally returned. It makes Hermann’s chest feel as though it is fit to burst – like he is trying to hold in the _sun_ – when Newton rambles now, when he talks a mile a minute for _hundreds_ of minutes because he knows Hermann will listen.

Hermann climbs out of the vehicle with some difficulty, and then stands and watches Newt as he hauls their luggage from the back of the jeep and slips a 5,000 yen note to the driver.

“There goes your lunch,” Hermann comments as the jeep trudges away, but Newt just gives him a look.

“He drove us three hours, quit whining, lunch can be on you for a change,” he shoots back as he wheels their luggage into the airport, leaving Hermann to harrumph to the empty space next to him.

Hermann pays for lunch but refuses to buy coffee. He is not sitting next to a caffeinated Newton for a ten-hour flight. Not in a million years.

Newt pouts but doesn’t push it.

It’s the first time either of them have flown commercially for a few years, and Hermann is not overly enthused. He takes the aisle seat so he can easily get up to stretch his leg, and Newt is forced to take the middle, leaving him trapped next to a ten-year old who had apparently already ‘called dibs’ on his preferred window seat before they had boarded.

It doesn’t become a problem until they’re five hours into the flight, and Hermann notices that Newt’s grip is tightening on his thigh.

“Are you okay Newton?” he asks, but Newt doesn’t reply. Hermann follows his gaze, and sighs when he realises why. 

Of all the films available on the flight, this child _had_ to have picked Godzilla.

For a few painful seconds they both watch as the monster crushes Osaka beneath its scaled feet, and Hermann shivers even though he knows he shouldn’t.

“Newton,” Hermann says quietly, “Go to sleep. I’ll wake you when we’re landing.”

“Yeah,” Newt replies, distracted, “Yeah okay.”

But he doesn’t move, his gaze utterly fixated on the tiny plastic screen, and Hermann’s heart absolutely breaks for him.

“Come here,” Hermann murmurs in his ear, and, as smoothly as he is able, he manages to contort both himself and Newton into a comfortable resting position, breaking his line of sight to the screen in the process. He drapes Newt’s legs over his, and feels his pulse flutter as Newt instinctively burrows into the familiar nook between Hermann’s collar bone and his heart where he normally lays his head down to sleep.

He can hear Newton’s mind racing around the tracks of his own skull, knows the plethora of feelings that are thrumming through him, and so he strokes his hip with his thumb and whispers, “Think of something nice. I don’t know… tadpoles…”

“Tadpoles?” Newt mumbles into his chest.

“You’re a biologist… tadpoles are the very basis of your field, are they not?”

“That is so rude man.”

Hermann snickers, and Newt thankfully smiles too. He falls asleep not long after, and if Hermann accidentally trips the child in the window seat with his cane when they disembark in Melbourne a few hours later then, well, accidents happen.

*

Melbourne turns out to be, for lack of a better descriptor, _insufferably_ hot.

“This is your fault,” Hermann groans for the umpteenth time, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief, “’ _Let’s go to Melbourne, it’s so much more fun than Cambridge_ ’, you said. ‘ _The heat won’t be that bad_ ’, you said.”

“Let it go man!” Newt replies from the kitchen of their open plan house, “Where else in the world do you get a view like this?” He gestures at the window wall of their living room where Hermann is doing his best to stay conscious, and out at the open sea, the waves rolling by mere yards from where he is sitting.

They had settled in St. Kilda, a little further out from the inner city. The constant deluge of people in the centre had been a particular concern when choosing a residence, and things were, mercifully, a little quieter here along the coast.

“That is beside the point Newton-”

“Stop whinging you big baby,” Newton interrupts, grinning from ear to ear, “The air con guys are coming tomorrow, and then you can cuddle back up inside your parka and you’ll be happy.”

Hermann pouts and Newt throws a cushion at his face.

“How’s the leg by the way?”

“…Adequate.”

Newt grins even wider. “So, what you’re saying actually is ‘ _Thank you Doctor Geiszler for your fantastic idea of moving to a country that is warm enough that my knee pain has improved for the first time in decades_ ’?”

“Something along those lines, I’m sure.”

*

They get Newt a new laptop, new mobile, and new glasses with the correct prescription ( _“Oh man, you are even more beautiful than I remembered”; “Hush Newton”_ ). His email inbox is even worse than Hermann’s had been, and it takes him the better half of two days to organise it completely. Hermann questions why he hadn’t just deleted everything, but it turns out to have been a good use of time when Newt uncovers an email from the Quraz storage company in Tokyo.

“Hermann!” he calls from their living room, the sun just beginning to set across the ocean’s horizon in the landscape behind him. When Hermann enters the lounge to join him, he is taken aback for the briefest second by the sight of Newt – phosphorescent in the deep orange glow of the sunset, his outline slightly blurred, understated, a painting brought to life. Hermann swallows deeply, and commits the image to memory.

He settles onto the sofa next to Newton, a little closer than is necessary, and even in the amber shadow cast upon them, he sees his cheeks flush. Hermann kisses the small space above his eyebrow, just because he can.

“Look!” Newt says excitedly, turning the laptop to face him, “They’ve got my stuff! Well done possessed me for thinking of putting all my shit into storage! Apparently, my payment for this year defaulted – not surprising really – so I can either renew it, or there’s an option for them to send all of it to me.”

Hermann’s interest in material objects rarely extended outside of first editions of classic texts (usually mathematics related, but he does have a penchant for Kropotkin) or collectible Tolkien-related merchandise (a secret he had once hoped to take to the grave). Even then, when he had his Massachusetts estate agent pack up his possessions after his apartment had sold, he had not held much regard for whether they arrived in Australia in one piece or not.

He and Newton differed in that respect. For Newton, the loss of his clothes, CDs, LPs, DVDs and Blu-rays, and books upon books upon books had come close to paralleling his despair over the loss of _himself_. “I’d had most of that stuff since I was a kid!” was one of the refrains Hermann had heard most frequently since they had arrived in Melbourne to a house that remains bare of decoration.

His possessions meant a lot to him; they were things that could just be replaced. New books wouldn’t have the same spinal deformities, new clothes wouldn’t have the same loose stitching, new LPs wouldn’t jump in the same places. It was clear to Hermann that Newt considered his belongings a part of him; the many odd and immutable objects that made up the odd and immutable man that he was.

“Does this mean I’m going to lose my study to your record collection?” Hermann complains, though he secretly doesn’t mind at all.

“Nah, nah,” Newt replies, “I’ll just put them in the bedroom.”

_Fantastic. There goes my eight hours of sleep a night_ , Hermann mourns.

Luckily for his sleep pattern, the threat of being inundated with Newton’s record collection does not come to pass upon the arrival of his possessions from Quraz.

It is the only piece of luck they have that day.

“Is this… it?” Newton says, unable to keep the dejection from his voice, “How is this everything that I own? I had loads of stuff.”

“Maybe you left some things in Massachusetts,” Hermann proposes, seeing where the conversation is going and trying to actively steer away from it, “Or you may have left them with relatives or colleagues.”

“No, I remember leaving Massachusetts for Tokyo. I remember that far back. I brought everything I owned with me, it was supposed to be a permanent move,” he states, and his voice is quaking with panic.

‘Everything’ is nothing more now than a few tailored suits, a small lot of science journals and textbooks, and several boxes worth of heavily redacted files. There is no trace of Newton in amongst the pristine white shirts and the berry blazers. No trace of the _Kaiju groupie_ amongst the numerous Filofaxes and various editions of the International Journal of Biological Sciences.

Hermann muses distractedly on the fact that he must now own more Kaiju memorabilia than Newton. The world must be spinning on an entirely new axis.

“I must’ve- _it_ must’ve… gotten rid of all of my things. All my records, all my books…” Newton says under his breath, as if the pile of boxes in front of him were a coffin, a body burning in a crematorium, “They’re all _gone_.”

“Newton-” Hermann says softly, but before he can reach out for him, Newt runs across the room and leaves through the back door that leads out onto the beach. The door slams behind him.

“Blast it,” Hermann swears to himself, grabbing his cane from where it is propped up by the kitchen table and following him out.

He can’t manoeuvre the beach very well yet – it turns out that sand is not a conducive material for those who struggle to walk – but he slowly makes his way across it, thankful that it is nearing dusk and there are few people around, and catches up to Newt.

Newton had never been one to rage quietly. Back in Hong Kong, when things had gone wrong (and they had gone wrong _a lot_ ), Hermann had always found himself subjected to loud rants, shouts accusing unknown people of _incompetence_ and _total stupidity_ and _do they not know how to handle Kaiju parts? Is that not included in their delivery training? This liver section is totally useless now!_ He had always tended to sit and let Newton tire himself out, had let him blast his music without complaint because Hermann knew it was better for him to get it out of his system than keep it all pent up.

He’s different now. How could he not be?

Hermann’s cane lands on the sand with a muted thump and he clambers down as well as he can until he is seated next to Newt. The man is utterly motionless, and it is unnerving to see someone so vibrant so still.

Hermann wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him close, and kisses the top of Newt’s head when he can’t stop himself from breaking into tears.

“Darling, darling, darling,” he murmurs into Newt’s ear, wrapping his other arm around him and holding him closer, running a hand up and down his back in a motion that he hopes is comforting. Newt is shaking under his hands, his breathing jittery and stilted as he cries against Hermann’s chest.

They were there at the end of the world, and it was much bigger and much darker than this, and yet Hermann feels as if he is there all over again.

“Why… why did it have to take _everything_?” Newt sobs against him, and Hermann can feel himself close to tears too, his eyes welling up in sympathy and pain, the Drift intensifying every cry.

Hermann doesn’t know what to say, and doesn’t trust himself to make something up, so he just holds Newton there, kisses the top of his head, his temple, his forehead, and doesn’t let go.

*

They only have two months or so before the new academic year, but they take it slow, nonetheless. After the disaster of Newt’s delivery, and the total inadequacy of Hermann’s wardrobe regardless of destination, they make their way to Melbourne Central for the first time – both in agreement that trying to wear suits in 40°C heat is, frankly, a ridiculous endeavour.

Newt glides through the aisles like he has done this a hundred times before, and within twenty minutes has managed to pick out an array of t-shirts, cotton shirts, shorts and trousers that will see him through the Australian summer.

In contrast, Hermann stands rooted to the spot, looking totally aghast at the idea of wearing short sleeves.

“You wore a short-sleeved shirt that first time we met,” Newt says, trying to be helpful as he steers Hermann through the men’s department, his own purchases already bagged up and in his hands.

“Yes, but I was _twenty-three_ ,” Hermann remarks through gritted teeth, beginning to feel frustrated and irritable at his inability to complete this basic task.

“And of course, yeah, it’s Newton’s fifth law that you can’t wear short sleeves when you’re in your forties,” Newt says back sarcastically, picking up a stripy t-shirt and hovering it in front of Hermann’s torso, snapping one eye shut to try and picture it on him.

“You would definitely look like a French mime if you wore stripes,” he comments absent-mindedly, and Hermann throws his arms in the air and stalks off.

Eventually corralled into the changing rooms with a pile of clothing in primarily neutral colours, Hermann thinks back on his sins, and wonders whether repenting in this fitting room will leverage him a divine way out. He sighs to himself and starts undressing when the fire alarm does not magically start ringing. Anyway, although he wishes he could say this was all a waste of time, he is currently sweating through his shirts at a rate of three a day and needs to find replacements _urgently_.

“Oh my god,” Newt says when he brushes past the curtain with the first outfit on, “Oh no Herm, all you need now is a pith helmet and you’re the spitting image of a 19th-century British colonist. No, no, not a good look man.”

So white shirts with tan trousers are out then, Hermann assumes, growling at Newt before he heads back inside.

It takes a while longer than he is comfortable with, but eventually Hermann finds a few shirts and pairs of trousers that will do for when he is at work. He’s only going in part-time – mostly because he doesn’t need to work, and he has someone he’d rather be back at home with – but he still wants to look the part. _Linen is your friend_ , a helpful store assistant had remarked about an hour in, when both he and Newton had begun to look like they had lost the will to live, and with her help, they were packed up and ready to head back to the house soon after.

Newton falls asleep on his shoulder on the tram ride home, and Hermann doesn’t wake him up.

*

Thankfully, Hermann only has to spend two hours a week teaching, with the rest of his time devoted to further exploration in the field of Breach Mathematics – a field that he created, and which the University of Melbourne has dedicated entire compulsory units to in both undergraduate and postgraduate study (Newton had accused him of bragging at that point, but he would _never_ be so _gauche_ ). His lectures are well attended – he and Newton, whilst never quite capturing the fame of the Jaeger Pilots, had still become rather well known following the War – but his demeanour and lecturing style make it clear that students are only welcome in his office if they have an actual issue with the maths: no autographs, no asking about Drifting with a Kaiju brain, and _especially_ no questions about Newton. He is territorial enough in response to a question from an overeager first year that rumours spread pretty quickly about their relationship.

He doesn’t bother addressing them. It isn’t like he is trying to hide it.

The media coverage of the Kaiju attempt to blow up Mount Fuji – or rather, Newt’s involvement in said plot – has been thankfully small, Hermann soon discovers. He doesn’t chance searching it at home, but when he has a few spare minutes in the office, he scours the internet looking for Newton’s name in relation to the incident and comes up with relatively little. The only places that seem to have reported his involvement are tertiary gossip sites and seedy discussion forums that are pages deep into Google’s search results.

Hermann thinks to himself that he must write to Rikushō Matsuo for scrubbing Newton’s name out of any official reports or media statements. He is sure that it cannot have been an easy task, and it is something that he is eternally grateful for.

They get the occasional stares whilst out in public, and on a weekend trip to the Scienceworks, Newt ends up giving an impromptu lecture to a band of teenagers on the now-proven ‘Kaiju-as-clones’ theory. They seem awed in a way that is difficult to achieve with adolescents, and the experience seems to boost Newton’s confidence in a way that Hermann had not expected.

He won’t ever go back to academia – not that he had loved it in the first place – but Newt does accept Hermann’s offer of a guest lecture a few months into his tenure at the university. Despite his clammy hands and shaky voice, he gets through it to rapturous applause.

The next time, he scatters in some of his old jokes, and it is like he has the whole world wrapped around his finger. Hermann has never been so proud.

They actually write the paper on sexual compatibility and Drift connectivity (the “research” for which is perhaps the most enjoyable scientific experimentation Hermann has ever participated in). It causes nothing short of a scandal in the academic community when it is published, and they win the Spearman Medal from the British Psychological Society for their “innovative and original” thesis.

To their credit, it is not as if anyone else can contest their data.

*

Things aren’t always good.

Newton still has trouble sleeping, and there are some mornings where he wakes up groggy and confused, pushing away at Hermann and wondering what exactly he is doing there “ _because you left me if you don’t remember_ ”. It only takes a few minutes for all the scattered pieces to come back together, but they still leave Hermann’s chest tight and aching, and Newton looking lost and exasperated. There are some days when Hermann catches him searching through music stores online, adding record upon record to the basket before deleting it all in anger.

But the bad moments grow fewer and further between as time passes, and suddenly, on one nonchalant Thursday morning, Newt tells him that he is _truly happy_ , and it feels like a miracle.

They bicker relentlessly the way they have always done, but now with better ways of exerting their frustrations. Newt learns to cook, and Hermann learns to love the sound of the smoke alarm. They spend long afternoons on the beach where Hermann reads under a parasol and Newt cracks comments about him looking like a Victorian orphan.

Hermann gets his revenge the one and only time Newt tries surfboarding.

During their first December in Australia – which comes about four months after their arrival – they make the joint decision to buy and light a hanukkiah. Maybe it is his age catching up with him, Hermann ponders, but it is the first time he lights the candles without feeling resentment in the pit of his stomach.

He and Newton recite the blessings together – words neither have spoken for an age, reforged in joy instead of solitude – and take each other to bed. The flames still flicker long after they fall asleep.

*

“You _are_ joking Newton,” Hermann snarls, stamping his cane against the ground, “I cannot believe that they have the _audacity_ -”

“Hermann will you calm down!” Newt shouts back, slamming the latter onto the kitchen table whilst Hermann paces around the living room, “It’s not a big deal! They only want me to drop in every six weeks or so to check on progress, it’s not like-”

“They email you at least twice a day, and now they want you to go back there! As if you weren’t doing enough for them!” Hermann rants, wishing he had a piece of his old familiar chalk in his hand so he could _launch it at Newton’s stupid head_.

“I told them they could email if they got stuck. They get stuck a lot!” Newt yells back, “It’s not my fault I know more than anyone else on the planet about all this stuff!”

“But they _know_ they could be putting you in danger by asking you to do this!” Hermann overrides him, so angry that he has to stop himself from kicking at the table, “You are doing so well, this could cause so many problems-”

“You have to stop treating me like I’m broken Hermann!” Newt shouts, and the barbed words Hermann had been planning to say next catch in the back of his throat. “I know how it felt to see me like that… I feel it through the Drift every time you worry about me, every time you have a nightmare, every time that you feel _happy_ and you think it’s all going to disappear. But you have to let me do this.”

“I wouldn’t dream of stopping you Newton,” Hermann says breathlessly, his heart tugging at all of his insides, “But I promised you I would keep you safe.”

“I know, and I know that you will,” Newt says gently, crossing the room to step by his side, “But it’s not necessarily going to hurt me. It’s just- it’s just…”. He stops, resting his hand on Hermann’s forearm, not sure how to end his sentence.

All of Hermann’s righteous indignation is forgotten at his very touch, and he kisses him lightly.

“It means going back to a place I hoped you would never have to return to,” he whispers, and Newton nods.

“I’m not exactly dying to visit myself,” he admits, sunbeams bouncing off the lenses of his glasses as he looks him in the eye, “But I can do some good. I can be useful, helpful even.”

“Why must you be useful? Why it is not enough that you are _here_?” Hermann asks softly, stroking Newt’s cheek with his thumb.

_You have nothing to prove. You have already done more than a million others ever could_.

“Because… I- They, _you_ , all spent so much time bringing me back. I have to do something in return, that’s how these things work,” Newt stammers, looking perplexed as Hermann immediately shakes his head.

“You weren’t brought back because you were needed Newton-” Newt opens his mouth to protest, but Hermann glares until he closes it again, “-You were brought back you were loved. Because I love you. Your life was worth saving because of who you are, not what you are capable of. Not for what you can contribute, but for the mere presence of you.”

It is the first time he has ever known Newton to be speechless, and Hermann lets his words settle as well as Newt will allow them to.

The strangest effect that the Drift has had on them is how they communicate emotionally. In the immediate aftermath of VE Day, he acknowledges that Newton had always been the pusher, had always been the one to chase Hermann wherever he went (not that he would have willingly parted from him). Newton had told him he loved him weeks before Hermann could bear to say it, weeks before he dared make himself so vulnerable. It was Newt that whispered those words into his neck every time they made love, every time Hermann brewed his coffee to get him out of bed, every time they worked late in the MIT labs together before driving home.

But the monsters stole so much from Newt – so many years and so many words – so now Hermann says them instead. Hermann lavishes him with beautiful whispers about love and desire and companionship, sentiments he would have been too embarrassed or too scared to say out loud before. He details his adoration and devotion as he lays Newton down onto their mattress; he worships him as they watch the evening news. Words now come as easy as numbers always have, and it is perhaps the greatest gift the Drift could have given him.

Newton’s words – when he reclaims his voice after a prolonged silence – surprise him though.

“There’s a part of me that misses it,” he says, hesitatingly, “Not having _it_ in my head, obviously, but the _science_. Just being in the lab with a Kaiju eye, a scalpel and some Hendrix, trying to save the world. Not because I had to – although, to be fair, we did _have to_ , but you know what I mean – but because it was _fascinating_ and incredible, and we were the first people to figure it all out. We literally got to create a new field of science. That happens like once a century, and _we_ did it. I miss being that person, the person who created things.”

And Hermann really can’t argue with that. The man does have six PhDs, after all.

“Let me save the world again Herm, come on,” Newt breathes, learning forwards onto the balls of his feet to kiss him, open mouthed and warm all over.

“Are you trying to seduce me into agreeing with you?” Hermann asks, raising an eyebrow when they eventually part. But his mind is made up, and Newton knows it. Newt smiles and drags him into their room by his shirt, and minutes later as his mouth makes its way around Hermann’s cock, he does admit, “Yeah, I am. It’s working though, isn’t it?”

Newton makes his first trip back to the PPDC facility in Japan two weeks after that. Hermann is invited to attend, but he refuses on principle. Newt texts him nonstop throughout the two days that he is there; he mostly makes fun of the Research and Development lab’s initial blueprints for anti-Kaiju nuclear weaponry ( _“have this lot even seen a Kaiju? It’d be like shooting a BB-gun at a T-Rex, Christ Hermann you should’ve come, you’d be loving this”_ ) and their investigations into interdimensional travel (“ _laughable, like something out of Star Trek but without the irony_ ”), but he also sends selfies of him and Pedreira eating lunch together with the caption: ‘reunited and it feels so good’.

Pedreira, bold as ever and greying at the temples, looks faintly amused in the photo, and Hermann lets Newt know his displeasure almost as soon as he gets home.

Newton enjoys it far too much to learn anything from it.

The journeys to the facility never come around more than once every two months, but Hermann grows to hate them every time. Not because he thinks that they are doing any harm to Newton – who thankfully seems to thrive with every trip – but because he _misses_ him when he is gone. Misses him _desperately_ , like a parched man combing the desert for an oasis. Newton is never absent for more than sixty hours at a time, and yet the house feels empty without him.

He often wonders how he managed to survive years of this in Massachusetts.

Hermann had never expected to become this sentimental, this attached, even all those years ago when he had felt himself irrevocably falling in love. _Newton Geiszler_ , he thinks to himself as he lies down and waits for another sleepless night to pass, _who could have predicted you?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was supposed to be the final chapter, but before I could start working on the *final* final bit, I checked the word count and it had already clocked in at 7,000 words. So the *final* final bit is going to be Chapter 7. Coming soon!


	7. The Addendum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hermann’s father dies eighteen months after they settle in Melbourne.

Hermann’s father dies eighteen months after they settle in Melbourne.

His sister calls – rigid, scripted, a mouthpiece the words have been programmed into – and tells him one afternoon as he sits on the porch of his and Newton’s house and reads the latest edition of The International Journal of Breach Science. It must be almost three in the morning from where she is calling.

Her German flows effortlessly; his is rusty and stilted.

He thanks her for letting him know – a courtesy as opposed to genuine sentiment – and relays an empty apology that he won’t be able to attend the funeral. Days later he will try and remember the excuse that he gives, but it slips from his mind the moment it falls out of his mouth. His sister does not seem surprised, but she pauses before she hangs up, quickly tells him that she loves him, and that becomes the most memorable part of the call in and of itself.

Hermann rests his mobile back inside his trouser pocket and relegates the journal to the cushion next to him. He knots his fingers together in his lap and stares out across the water, trying to summon a single emotion to the forefront of his mind, but he can’t quite figure out which it is that he wants. There is a swarm inside, anger and pity moving as one – indistinguishable and indeterminable, and disconcerting as all hell.

He rubs his temples and for a moment hopes that he can summon up the courage to feel _sad_ , but nothing comes to his rescue.

He hasn’t spoken to his father since accepting his position at the University of Melbourne, and even then, the call had been a mandatory exercise, mutually enforced by his mother and his sister who, despite being present his entire childhood, still could not seem to fathom the distance between the two of them; who couldn’t seem to understand why a son could not learn to love a father in spite of all that he had done.

They hadn’t “made up” in the ten-minute conversation they had endured; they had not talked about the Walls, about Lars’ defunding venture, about Hermann’s Drift that had saved the world. They had not talked about Newton, nor the Kaiju brain, nor what had happened on the slopes of Mount Fuji. They had not even managed the pleasantries, with Hermann eventually hanging up when his father had started to lecture him on returning to Cambridge, or as he had put it, “ _a real university_ ”.

Hermann is sure he is currently supposed to feel some form of regret over that last phone call, and yet that emotion remains buried too. He rubs his temples and sighs aloud.

A weight has been lifted from his shoulders, but an artificial grief has taken its place – a grief that does not belong to him, but one that he knows he must carry too.

_You’re a part of this family whether you like it or not!_

Hermann gets up, the stabbing pain in his leg noticeably lessened, as it has been in the recent months. The ache remains, the shadow, but the worst of it is being gradually excised out through physical therapy – a concession in his argument to get Newton to continue on in therapy too. He is loath to admit that he was wrong to leave it this long to start with, but Newt’s wry smile every time he gets up off the sofa without a groan always puts him in his place.

He takes his cane anyway, just in case, and makes his way down the steps of their porch onto the sand. He toes off his shoes and then his socks – “ _it’s their winter over here now Newton, I’ll wear my socks if I want”_ – and then slowly approaches the water’s edge.

Australians, he has learned, have abnormal internal temperature gauges. Whilst he and Newt are still struggling to adjust to the summer heatwaves ( _“It’s not even a heatwave man, this is just what they put up with every summer, we’re genuinely going to die”_ ), the moment the clouds begin to converge in early April, the crowds disperse and the coastline empties.

As a result, there is precisely no one on the beach right now, save for him of course. The sand begins to turn to sludge underneath his toes as he ventures closer to the water, gripping at the soles of his feet, and he exerts a little more effort to keep moving. The ocean roils caustically straight ahead, far more so than it does during the summer, and it lashes out at him, threatening to soak him even when he is still metres away.

Hermann pauses for a moment and then rolls his trousers up until the cuffs reach the middle of his shins. He takes a few careful steps and then feels the rush of the bitterly cold water around his feet; he breathes out deeply at the chill and closes his eyes.

He listens to the chaotic orchestra of restless waves collapsing against one another, and there is a strong breeze coming in from the east. Hermann tries to memorise the feeling of it – the way his forearms begin to spring goose bumps, and the tingling sensation building in his forehead as the cold touches his nose – so he can remind himself of it when summer comes around again.

The sea pools around his ankles and he remembers that there are sometimes sharks in these waters.

His phone starts ringing in his pocket, and it takes him a second to recall where exactly he is.

Hermann steps back from the claws of the sea and onto the sand and drags the ‘answer’ icon across the screen when he sees that it is Newt calling.

“Newton, to what do I owe the pleasure?” he asks, smiling despite himself.

“Are you okay?” is the immediate reply, Newt sounding harried and flustered, “I just got this feeling that something happened, you know like a bad feeling in your gut, so I thought I’d better check in. Something has happened hasn’t it? I can feel you squirming in my head.”

“Everything is fine,” Hermann replies unconvincingly, “I- I just found out…”

He doesn’t know why he can’t get the words out.

“Herm, what’s happened?”

The sentence is already built in the back of his throat, but his mouth won’t cooperate.

“Herm, baby…”

“It’s my father,” Hermann manages to force out, “My father… he’s passed away.”

Newton knows the rough edges of his relationship with his dad, has seen them, _felt_ them through the Drift, so at least he won’t caress him with empty platitudes and offer useless words of comfort, Hermann thinks as he waits for Newt to reply.

“Shit,” the man settles on, “I’ll come home.”

“That’s not necessary,” Hermann argues, “You’ve only been there a few hours, and by the time you get back it’ll be past midnight. Just finish your weekend and I’ll see you on Monday.” His confidence is less than convincing.

Another trip to the facility, perfectly timed so it seemed.

“I’m literally already walking to the landing pad,” Newt informs him, “And now…”

There is a pause of nearly ten minutes, interspersed with the faint rap of footsteps, and the occasional muffled sound of Newton’s still-broken Japanese.

Finally, he re-emerges and announces, “Now I’m already getting on the plane. I’ll be home before you’ve got time to miss me.”

The facility had built the private airstrip last year, and Hermann smiles down the phone.

“Thank you, Newton.”

“Sit tight until I’m there, okay? Make sure you eat, get some dinner- Hey, order from that Thai place and put some in the fridge for me. Just… eat, definitely eat, and watch some TV and wait for me. I’ll be there really soon, like, faster than anyone has ever gotten from Japan to Australia before.”

Hermann’s heart flares in his chest.

“Newton, despite your many talents, I doubt that even you can reduce the length of a flight,” he says indulgently, tucking his arms around his body as the wind blows a little stronger, “Unless you have somehow harnessed the power to control the weather.”

“Twenty-five years and you’re still underestimating me,” Newt says, tutting down the phone, and Hermann smiles widely, “The things I can do that you don’t know about would blow your mind.”

“As promising as that sounds,” Hermann proffers, and Newt laughs heartily down the end of the line, “I will settle for your being here.”

“As soon as I can be,” Newt says softly, and the call ends as Hermann begins the short journey back to their house.

He does order from the Thai place, but he doesn’t really taste any of it as he eats. He blinks and the clock jumps from five to ten, but after that he finds that he cannot concentrate on anything for very long. He watches half of a QI repeat but switches it off in irritation when he discovers that only fifteen minutes have gone by; he tries to pick up the article he was reading earlier, but the words just scramble in front of him. Eventually he puts on a Pink Floyd album and reclines on the sofa, praying for sleep, distraction, _Newton_.

Sometime later, his phone beeps, and Hermann scrambles for it, only to be disappointed that it isn’t Newt’s name flashing across the screen. Instead, it’s his sister for the second time today (and indeed, this year, if he is cruel about it), and he curses her for her psychology PhD and subsequent meddlesome ways.

Hermann has no photos of his biological family in his possession, and he is okay with that. Instead, he covets the images he has of the people he considers his _real_ family – those rare, brilliant individuals that he was privileged to save the world alongside. In his study, he has a corkboard with photos of all of them – Raleigh, Mako, Herc and Chuck, Tendo, the Marshal. And Newton. Obviously, Newton.

There are so many photos of Newton that they are layered up like post-it notes, and he has to rifle through to see them all – snapshots of sweet moments, of wondrous adventures and miscellaneous dinners, and even a few photos from the _old_ days back in Hong Kong: pictures snuck in the lab of Newton dozing in his chair, mouth wide open, and even a candid shot by Mako of the two of them fighting in full flagrante, arms raised and eyebrows sharply drawn.

He chose this man to be his family, and that means more to him than blood ever could.

And yet here is now with a photo of his father too.

 _It’s okay to miss him_ , is what the first part of the accompanying text says.

Hermann looks down at the screen and hates how much he resembles the man on the front of the order of service. They have the same eyes, the same high cheekbones, although his father’s expression is stern, and Hermann hopes his own is far kinder.

Lars’ death must not have been a surprise, given how quickly the funeral preparations seem to have been made. He lingers on the realisation that he hadn’t even known his father was ill.

Karla has also texted some psychobabble about _feeling his feelings_ , and he is tempted to throw the phone at the wall in response, because his only feeling right now is indignation.

 _You’re a part of this family whether you like it or not_ , his father had once shouted.

 _You can’t make me be anything_ , he remembers shouting back, and _You can’t make me_ is what he wants to text back now, but he shoves the phone to one side and tries to rein himself in before he does something childish and churlish like blocking his sister’s number.

He hears Newton’s key scraping in the lock, but suddenly all he wants is to be left alone.

Newt’s bag drops to the kitchen floor with a loud thump and then the man is dropping onto the sofa next to him, reaching out for him and leaving a lingering kiss on his temple.

“Please do _not_ coddle me Newton,” he snaps at the touch, and Newt rolls his eyes with such force that Hermann swears he can hear it.

“So we’re doing it like that, are we?” he replies, though he sounds more tired than annoyed, “And here I was thinking that I left the annual general meeting with five minutes notice, and then took a ten-hour flight, _because_ you wanted me to come and coddle you.”

Newt reaches out a hand and grasps his chin gently, tilting Hermann’s head so he cannot avoid making eye contact with him. It’s an effective move, because all of his frustration at Karla rushes out upon seeing him.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, dropping his head onto Newt’s shoulder and inhaling the smell of his shirt, wet from the rain, “I’m sorry.”

He feels Newt’s brushing careless concentric circles into his hair with his thumb, and the small weight of his chin resting atop his head is more comforting than a million texts from his sister could ever be.

“It’s okay Herm,” Newt says quietly, “For what it’s worth – and I know you don’t need to hear it, but I’ll say it anyway – I’m sorry too.”

Newt holds him closer, wraps his arms almost completely around him, and Hermann feels warm to his bones despite the fact that Newt is drenched through.

“C’mon, bed,” Newt eventually says through a yawn, and Hermann feels a pang of guilt for being the root cause of his obvious exhaustion. Hermann nods his compliance and follows Newton to their room.

He watches – always, and always with the same fascination – as Newt peels his shirt off and them clambers out of his trousers, but before he can rummage around for a towel to dry himself from the thunderstorm outside, Hermann has already retrieved one from their chest of drawers.

“Come here,” he says, so lightly that he barely hears the words himself, but Newt walks towards him with nothing short of a swagger, and drops his glasses onto the bedside table. He steps in and kisses him like he has all the time in the world and nothing else to do with it, until Herman gives him a playful shove in the chest and wipes the water from his face.

Hermann lifts the towel and strokes it across Newton’s head until his hair looks as if he has been shocked, and then drags it along the expanse of his arms, brushes it over his torso, around his shoulder and down his back; he wraps the towel around his thighs, hovering over the water droplets that linger there, and then drops to his knees to catch the moisture trailing along his calves.

“You are not as slick as you think you are,” Newt says breathlessly, but when Hermann kisses the inside of his knee, Newt’s positively _quivers_.

“Get up here,” he orders, though it is barely more than a whine, and Hermann rises to his feet as quickly as his leg will allow him.

Newt switches off the light and Hermann lives for the pressure of Newt’s hands on his shoulders as he pushes him down onto the mattress, lives for the glorious weight of his body on top of his before their lips meet and move together in tender strokes. Newt’s hands begin to reach all over him, touching him like he is made of solid gold, and Hermann can’t resist running his hands across the small of his back, digging in his fingers until Newt groans into his mouth. Even then he doesn’t stop, slowly stroking at his still-damp skin until his hands are cupping his arse; he squeezes at the same moment that Newt presses his tongue against his, and the sensation is _spectacular_.

“God, I love the way your hands feel on me,” Newt whimpers against him, trailing his mouth along Hermann’s jaw, the lightest scrape of his teeth against the skin there making Hermann shiver all over, “Don’t want- don’t want you to ever stop touching me.”

Hermann digs his fingernails into the flesh of Newton’s thigh and the man makes a guttural noise that resembles the word “ _Please_ ”.

It still amazes him to this day, how quickly he is able to make Newton lose himself like this; how quickly Hermann can tame the riot and reduce him to arched cries and desperate pleas. He leverages a knee against the mattress and flips Newton onto his back without warning, climbing on top of him before he has a chance to catch his breath. There is no plan in his mind, no map of Newt’s body directing him where to go, just a sudden haze of want so strong that it nearly chokes him. He grinds his hips harshly against Newton’s just for a second of relief, for the friction he so desperately needs, and Newt’s mouth drops open below him, gasping for breath. There’s a void in his head, so aware and so pressing, and only Newt can fill it, only _this_ can make him whole again.

Hermann traces the shape of Newton’s open mouth with his thumb, but before he can lean down to devour it, to eat him alive, Newt stops him.

Hermann can feel his heart thrumming against his ribcage, threatening a jailbreak, and he blinks rapidly as he comes back to himself; he can feel Newt’s heavy breaths under his fingertips.

“What’s going on in there?” Newt asks tentatively, extending his hand to touch the centre of Hermann’s forehead with his finger, “You’re all hazy. Blurry even.”

The frenzy slips away. He can feel Newton, hard and trembling, but the current of affection and concern he is currently broadcasting across the Drift overlays the physical sensations they are both still inhibiting. When he doesn’t respond, Newt takes Hermann’s hand from where it rests on his chin, and kisses the centre of his palm, never once breaking eye contact with him. He kisses the inside of his wrist, wets the prominent veins that give him life with the tip of his tongue, and touches him with a devoted, heartfelt tenderness. His other hand skims across Hermann’s stomach before diverting at his hip, tracing the space where wrecked tendons and shattered cartilage lie underneath.

The touch says _I love you_ more convincingly than words of any language could ever manage. The touch says _tell me, trust me, I’m here_.

“Just a little out of sorts, I’m fine,” Hermann says placatingly, but there is a growing anxiety pulling in his chest that he might not be. He falls into the space beside Newt on the bed, the pain in his leg enough to warrant the drop.

“It’s okay Herm,” Newt replies, “It’s okay to feel… however you’re feeling. Conflicted. Confused.”

“I do not get confused,” he quips back to Newt’s amusement, but this isn’t like it was back in Hong Kong, even in Massachusetts. He doesn’t think he could hide anything from Newton now if he wanted to.

“But I do feel, how did you put it, _conflicted_ , yes,” he admits, curling his lips around the word as if his disdain for the emotion will make it disappear.

“Tell me what you’re conflicted about,” he hears Newton say, and Hermann shifts onto his side to take in a glimpse of him. He finds that Newt’s expression is painted not with worry, but with the promise of endless patience, and he leans gratefully into the touch when Newt wraps his arm around Hermann’s torso. He feels Newt’s hair brush against his chin as he settles his head onto his chest, and the void calms ever more.

“Do you think less of me?” Hermann dares to ask, “For not mourning? For not… for feeling conflicted, instead of grief-stricken?”

“Never,” Newt replies with the certainty of a saint, “There is nothing you could do that would make me think less of you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Absolutely positive. And anyway, you remember how I was when my mum died. I can hardly judge you for your reaction – at least you’re doing it quietly.”

Hermann recalls the solid fortnight they had spent in the laboratory listening to the collected works of the Spanish opera singer Monserrat Caballé on repeat – and at full volume – when Newton had received the email about his mother’s death. _She was her favourite_ , was the only thing he had said, and Hermann had not known enough about grief and its many facets to offer condolence or contradiction.

Newt kisses the underside of his chin, and Hermann hears the faintest echo of _Barcelona_ in the receding part of his brain. In spite of himself, and in spite of the words he knows he is about to say, Hermann lets a smile flutter across his mouth.

“He used to treat us like colleagues,” he finally says, breaking down the floodgates before he loses courage, “My father. We were _children_ but were never allowed to act like it. He was always testing us, testing our intellect, our capabilities, and if we didn’t respond in kind, we instantly earned his contempt.”

“Some people aren’t meant to be parents,” Newt says soothingly, “Some people just… don’t know how to love properly.”

“I thought I didn’t,” Hermann admits, and a frustrated tear rolls down his cheek for all the years he lost thinking he was _broken_ , “I could never forgive him. Karla did, our mother did, but I never could. I thought that meant there was something wrong with me. If you can’t love your own father… How are you supposed to know how to love anything else?”

“You understand love better than anyone I have ever met,” Newt says passionately, angrily almost, though Hermann knows it is not anger at him, but at the ghost still haunting him, “I’ve _seen_ it. I saw them – through the Drift. The things he did. The things he said to you. I saw what it was to grow up without anyone ever telling you how important you are-”

 _Memories he had pushed to the back of his head decades ago, moments he had sworn would die with him, shameful secrets that_ nobody _could ever find out about. Memories of shouts and insults and threats and abandonment; memories of a man standing over a small child telling him he was worthless, that he would never amount to anything. And he_ did _, that small child grew up and_ did _amount to something, but even then, with every misplaced integer, every incorrect equation, he never learned how to get rid of his father’s voice in his head telling him he was undeserving of it all._

“-and you still went out into the world and loved it enough to save it.”

Hermann can feel the rage burning in Newt’s chest, and it feels like being blessed by holy fire; he still makes a disparaging noise in the back of his throat, but Newt speaks before he can vocalise it.

“You went into the world, and found me, and loved me enough to save me too.”

He looks up at Hermann from where he is tucked into the crook of his neck and jokes, “But we can talk about how you’re the stupid one out of the two of us later.”

“Oh, I have done many stupid things in my life Newton,” Hermann admits, “But you will never be one of them.”

“I’m the special case, am I?” Newt teases, counting Hermann’s ribs with his thumb, his hand slowly dipping further and further down.

Hermann stares at him in incredulity. _Does he not realise that that is_ exactly _what he is?_

“Sometimes I think I only tried so hard to save the world because you were in it,” he confesses, and he should be down on his knees saying this because it must surely be a sin to love one person so wholly above anything else, “The maths, the discoveries, the recognition… it was all surplus to you being safe. It started off as genuine scientific curiosity about the Breach, the Kaiju, but somewhere along the way, it became about you instead.”

A long pause rests between them.

“You know you can’t just say that to a guy with no warning Herm,” Newt finally chokes out, and Hermann catches him surreptitiously trying to wipe tears away from his eyes before they can fall onto his chest and give him away.

“I should have thought you knew so already,” he replies, bluffing his way through, his cheeks burning as he speaks, “That everything that I do is somehow for you.”

He is unsurprised when Newt kisses him, but the lightness of his touch is shocking. For a man who has always jumped into every situation with the grace of a bull in a china shop, Newt holds him now like he can’t believe he is real, like he is fine china and even the slightest movement could shatter him. The humidity of his mouth is warm and welcoming and Hermann leans into him with a lazy ease.

They make love like they have done a hundred times before, but there is a sense of purpose to it tonight. It’s… reassuring, affirming, almost a communion. They are not married ( _yet_ , they think simultaneously), but it serves as a vow, as a rite, as a promise that this is _it_ now, for the both of them.

Mathematics had taught him that universal constants did not exist, but then he had met Newton, and realised that not only were they real, but inevitable too. 

Newt holds him closer than he normally does, spends much more time pressing his lips against Hermann’s skin, working his mouth across his body without agenda or intent. This is a journey of exploration, not domination; he is a celestial cartographer mapping out a brand-new constellation.

Hermann is cursed to simply follow his movements, pinned down under him – a slow, beautiful torture. Newt tamps down his wrists against the sheets delicately enough that Hermann could easily writhe out of his grip, but as Newton continues with his ministrations, he finds that he does not want to. He soon finds himself keening at even the scarcest touch, biting down on his lip to stop himself from crying out for more.

“You are _so_ responsive,” Newt says in disbelief as he licks at his inner thigh, and Hermann shakes so hard he expects to fall off the bed.

“And you-” Hermann gasps, “Are a _horrible_ man.”

His father was wrong. He deserves success, happiness – he deserves _Newton_ , as much as the Earth deserves the sun, as much as the stars deserve the night sky. They are a scientific truth, a law of nature unto themselves.

Newt doesn’t pull at Hermann’s hair or drag his fingernails down his back, nor does he stutter out curses or arch against him in ecstasy. When he comes, he does so with a long, jittery exhale, his mouth pressed into Hermann’s shoulder. His right hand still steadily works Hermann’s cock until he blissfully spends himself seconds later, and then Newton sinks right back down next to him and curls around him, cocooning him within his arms.

Hermann is normally the ‘big spoon’ (“ _an appalling epithet_ ”), but he finds he doesn’t mind being held too much at all. He hears Newton whisper _I love you_ through the Drift, and he feels calm – almost serene – at last. The rampant thunderstorm outside is winding down too, and Hermann lets the soft pitter-patter of rain against the window lull him into a light sleep.

“What do you think happens we die?” Newt asks suddenly, and the question snaps him out of the paradisiacal afterglow. Hermann groans, and resists the urge to elbow him.

“Newton, it is-” he cracks his eyes open and peers through the dark until he finds the alarm clock on Newt’s side of the bed “-two in the morning. Do you not think this could wait until later?”

“Sorry, I was just stuck thinking about it.”

“Well I’m glad that our intercourse was satisfying enough that it led you to ruminate on death, that is very reassuring,” he replies grumpily, though the acidity is lessened when Newt kisses the back of his neck.

Thereafter follows an intrepid silence, and Hermann groans in defeat after a minute or so.

“Fine, what do you want to discuss?” he gives in, and Newton sparks to life behind him, evidently having been waiting for permission to be granted.

“Do you think that there’s an afterlife?” he questions thoughtfully, “Something beyond all of this?”

“No,” Hermann replies honestly, turning over to face him, “No, and I hope there isn’t. The idea of existing until the end of the universe is a very ugly thought indeed.”

“But what about us?” Newt persists, “Do you thinks things could be different for us? Because of the Drift?”

“What are you suggesting?” Hermann asks, now faintly intrigued, “That there is some form of… Kaiju afterlife that we might be granted entry to? Newton, we do not yet understand the physics or philosophy of a human afterlife – shall we avoid adding alien realms into the mix?”

Newton pokes his chest in reprimand for the mockery and then says, “That’s obviously not what I meant. But our base brain chemistry has been… irrevocably altered by the Drift, not to mention what’s happened to me since. The brain dies with the body, but what about our connection? It’s not just neural- it’s almost metaphysical, it transcends different planes of existence, it has to. So, could it exist after death?”

Hermann arches an eyebrow at him.

“You need to consume less caffeine,” he says flatly, “I highly doubt we will be able to communicate at the point of, or beyond, death.”

“Yeah, but-”

“Newton, you died in my arms once before,” Hermann snaps, “And if there is any mercy in the universe at all, I will not have to experience it again.”

That quietens him for a moment, and Hermann feels vaguely guilty for getting so riled up. He illuminates an apology in his mind, holds it up like a neon sign, and he knows Newton hears it.

Long gone are the days when he had considered their connection to be a strange, extraneous thing, and not just… _part_ of them instead.

“Do you think we’ll live longer than the average person?” Newton asks hopefully, and Hermann chuckles softly and says, “Perhaps. Though I think the contrary position is far more likely, I’m afraid. As you say, our minds have been thoroughly meddled with.”

Newt harrumphs at that, though he cannot argue against it, and Hermann idly runs his hand up and down his back.

“Are you afraid of dying?” Hermann questions, aware that he is prying but concerned at the line the conversation has taken, “Why all of these questions?”

“I never used to be,” Newt replies, “But I think I’ve gotten comfortable now. I like things the way they are. I couldn’t get used to anything else. And death is a big… something else, you know? And then there’s…”

“There’s what?”

Newt sighs, like he is reprimanding himself, before he admits, “There’s what I leave behind. Honshū is still a wreck, you know. Shizuoka and Yamanashi still haven’t been rebuilt properly; thousands of people lost their homes... I shifted the balance when I- when the Kaiju tried to blow up Mount Fuji, and I think things might be stacked against me. I still haven’t made up for what I did.”

Hermann shakes his head. “They weren’t things that you did Newton. You _know_ that. You’re not going to be punished – don’t spend the spend the rest of your life being afraid of that.”

Hermann worries that Newt is never quite going to believe that he isn’t responsible for what happened in Tokyo three years ago. He worries that the guilt is never going to fully fade. But he supposes that is part of his job now; Newton once convinced him that he deserved to be happy, so he owes him the same.

“Come on then,” Hermann asks, trying to pique Newt’s curiosity, “I’ve told you what I think. What do _you_ think happens when we die?”

Newt takes a breath and traces strange unknowable shapes into Hermann’s chest.

“I’m not sure. When it happened… before, at the facility, I don’t think there was _anything_. And I don’t think there’s any evidence for the afterlife, not that we’ve seen yet. I learnt about _olam habah_ at Hebrew School, and it always seemed too good to be true.” He smiles wryly, “But then there’s no evidence that can really explain me and you. I don’t know what will happen when we die – I just hope that _whatever_ there is, if anything, it’s somewhere that I get to be with you.”

And Hermann can’t deny that he likes the thought of that very much indeed.

“Go to sleep darling,” he hums, sensing their joint need for sleep, and he closes his eyes in example, and rests his hand possessively at the dip of Newt’s hip.

“I’ll dream of you,” Newt teases before he too closes his eyes and lets the combined forces of jetlag and emotional exhaustion overtake him. Hermann smiles against his cheek, inhales the scent of him, and whispers, “Only if you’re very lucky.”

Newt falls into a slumber soon afterwards, and before he allows sleep to capture him too, Hermann can’t help but let a thought slip through the Drift into the neural – or indeed, metaphysical – space that they share.

_You needn’t worry about your mortality Newton._

He clings to him just a little tighter.

_After all, rock stars do live forever._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there are only about 5 of you reading it, but I am grateful for all of you :)) I really hope you have enjoyed reading this fic as much as I have writing it!!


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